STEM Outreach Program: An evaluation on students' perspective towards STEM engagement via school-university mentoring partnership

Abstract

The number of students pursuing science and engineering is reducing drastically over the years which is of great concern to the country. Hence, in 2011, the Malaysia Education Blueprint was initiated emphasizing on the role of STEM for establishing a scientific and innovative society. The National STEM Movement has taken the step forward to make the blueprint a reality by initiating the STEM Mentor-Mentee program in schools facilitated by universities. Universiti Selangor (Unisel) contributed actively through the participation of lecturers as facilitators and students as mentors. Fondly known as the Unisel Fun with STEM program, the team has shared their modules with seven schools in Selangor. This particular study is focusing on one of the schools, SMK Sungai Burong involving 60 students and 3 teachers, assessing the effectiveness of the module and the impact of mentoring approach. A five Likert scale survey was conducted at the end of the program with each of the four domains received positive feedback. The program itself was well-executed with the mean score of 4.24. The response towards the mentoring approach was very favourable, resulting in the mean score of 4.61. This outreach program is considered effective as students demonstrated positive attitude towards the module and STEM field.