Teachers’ self-perception in maker education: three approaches for STEM professional development

Abstract

Maker education plays an important role in joining the STEM education fields for preparing students for the new demands in society. It is essential to prepare teachers to implement the maker education in their lessons, not only focusing on the technical skills they need to acquire, but also on their attitudes and self-perception regarding the maker education. This paper analyzes the effect that three different approaches for teacher professional development on the maker education have on teachers' self-perceived ability for implementing the maker education in their practice. The results indicate that there is a significant improvement regarding the feeling of being able to design maker-based educational lessons after participating in any of the professional development courses. This effect is more significant in those approaches where participants are selfmotivated to participate and that foster individual learning. Participating in an online training that doesn't teach on the specific technological tools nor requires to design nor implement a maker-based project, decreases the perception of having training opportunities to learn how technological tools work. More practical activities requiring the development of a maker project should be offered to teachers to improve their self-perception regarding the maker and STEM education in primary education levels.

Responsible Educational Technology Research: From Open Science and Open Data to Ethics and Trustworthy Learning Analytics

“…These angles include public engagement, gender, sustainability, science education or inclusion. The TIDE research group at UPF is committed to gender and international diversity, as reflected in its composition (currently over 20 members with equal gender balance and 13 different nationalities), and has started to incorporate the gender, science education and inclusion perspectives determinedly in their studies (e.g., Vujovic et al, 2021;Martínez, Santos & Hernández-Leo, 2021). Mutual inspiration through shared good practices in all angles of responsibility in data and science cultures in educational research will definitely contribute to better science with increasingly positive social impact.…”