An Investigation of the Views on the Integration of Science Technology and Mathematics in a Mathematics Teacher Education Program

Özet

Öz STEM is a new concept for Turkey. Interest is increasing in the academic community of the related fields andespecially in the field of education of science and mathematics. At the practical level there are sparseindividual efforts of practice in high schools by teachers of science and mathematics. Therefore our primaryaim is to understand how this idea is reflected in the minds of teacher candidates of the related fields in a nonintegratedmathematics-science program. We also analyzed the curricula followed in the above programs.Our sample consisted of 349 teacher candidates from the departments of mathematics, science and computereducation and instructional technologies education who were in their final years. For this inquiry we use amixed methods strategy. We use both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data comes from thescale developed by the researchers “The integration of STEM” and also from a questionnaire for thedemographics of the sample. Qualitative data comes from the programs used in the departments. Documentanalysis method and descriptive & inferential statistics techniques, are used to analyze data from the scaleand from the questionnaire. Findings of the study suggest positive attitudes towards STEM integration.Findings also indicate similar and different attitudes with respect to the department. Reasons for these werediscussed with regard to the current literature and to the curricula of the departments under study.