Development and evaluation of STEM based instructional design: An example of quadcopter course

Abstract

STEM is an acronym that refers to the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The term is typically used in schools to improve competitiveness in science and technology development. The purpose of this study is to develop instructional design based on 6E’s STEM and investigates its impact on participants’ knowledge. The participants were 48 junior high school students, and a quasi-experimental research design was employed. The course is about concept instruction and the assembly of quadcopters. The content of online discussion was analyzed through the quantitative content analysis and the lag sequential analysis. The experimental results indicated that the STEM based instructional design not only enhanced students’ learning achievement, but also improved their discussion quality.