STEM education has benefits for students, such as increasing achievement and improving attitudes, motivation, interest toward STEM disciplines, and higher-order thinking skills. Teachers' characteristics, perceptions, and attitudes related to STEM influence teachers' implementation of integrative STEM approaches and, as a result, shape the learning environment. This study examined 513 pre-service teachers' attitudes towards STEM in terms of multiple variables (department, class level, gender, having a traineeship, or information about STEM) and investigates the relationship between participants' attitudes and academic grade point averages. Participants were pre-service preschool, classroom, science, and mathematics teachers that can be considered the basis of the STEM pipeline. Data were collected via a survey and were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA, and Pearson product-moment correlation. Results show that pre-service science teachers, senior pre-service teachers, and participants who had information or a traineeship about STEM had more positive attitudes towards STEM. There was no relationship between attitudes and grade points. It was also seen that the attitudes towards engineering-technology explain the most variance in the attitudes towards STEM. Therefore, the teacher preparation programs should give more attention to integrate the courses of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and help the pre-service teachers (regardless of their departments) to realize the connectedness of STEM subjects.
Teachers with a high level of self-efficacy and positive attitudes are more likely to use new and constructivist approaches and to create a learning environment in which students may develop 21st-century skills. Examining pre-service teachers’ attitudes and beliefs related to teaching allow teacher preparation programs to evaluate their effectiveness on beliefs and attitudes. This correlational research investigated pre-service elementary science and mathematics teachers’ beliefs and attitudes due to gender, grade level, and department, and revealed the reliable correlation between beliefs and attitudes performing partial correlation. Results show that females feel more efficacious in teaching and have more positive attitudes than males. 4th grades also perceive a higher level of efficacy for student engagement and using instructional strategies than 1st grades. Partial correlation coefficients revealed positive strong relationships between attitudes and efficacy beliefs. Recommendations are suggested based on implications.
The technology acceptance model (TAM) is a widely used framework to investigate factors influencing technology use in education. TAM refers to a person's technology-related attitudes and beliefs influencing intention to use and actual use of technology and seeks predictors of behaviors whether to accept or reject using technology. There are various external variables extended to TAM to increase the predictivity of the model and the generalizability of findings. However, what is not yet clear is the impact of teacher-related variables such as teaching efficacy and epistemological beliefs on teachers' technology acceptance and behavioral intention. This study examined 710 preservice teachers' technology acceptance using an extended-TAM with scientific epistemological and science teaching efficacy beliefs. Data were collected through a self-reported measurement tool. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze data. Results revealed that the research model explained 59% of the variance in behavioral intention, and perceived usefulness is the most prominent determinant of behavioral intention. The subdimension of scientific epistemological beliefs, justification, is the strongest determinant in influencing TAM constructs among the external variables (epistemological and science teaching efficacy beliefs). Science teaching efficacy beliefs had small effects on technology acceptance constructs. Recommendations were made based on the findings.
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