Abstract
STEM education promotes scientific inquiry and engineering design, including mathematics, incorporating appropriate technologies. Portable technologies motivate active learning of students and enable accessing to learn resources, facilitating cross-disciplinary designing tasks. This chapter initially presents theoretical approaches of STEM education, mobile learning, and inquiry-based learning, and then it describes an inquiry-based short-term intervention that took advantage of portable digital devices in a STEM class. The aim of the intervention was to study its affection on students' motivation about physics. Results indicate that students who participated in the activity had higher motivation scores than their classmates who attended lessons with conventional teaching methods. The findings also show that the students involved in a guided inquiry-based process became more profoundly engaged in STEM than their classmates who followed a structured inquiry process. Other factors, such as grade point average (GPA) and gender, did not seem to affect student motivation.
TopBackround
The Background consists of a brief literature survey on the various aspects of STEM education and Inquiry-based Learning in the Mobile Area and on the methods for enhancing the students’ motivation.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Inquiry-Based Learning: A constructivist approach in which students are placed in the position of scientists.
Motivation: An individual's desire to learn concepts or complete learning tasks.
21st Century Skills: Abilities that today’s students need to succeed in their careers during the Information Age.
Stem Education: Teaching and learning in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics with the aim of improving students’ skills to apply cross-disciplinary knowledge effectively in order to solve problems.
Scaffolding: A variety of instructional techniques utilized to move students progressively toward better understanding and greater independence in the learning process.
High-Level Thinking: Thinking on a level that is higher than memorizing or understanding facts. The higher thinking levels are analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Mobile Learning: Learning in multiple contexts, through social interactions, using personal digital mobile devices.
Mobile Inquiry-Based Learning: The employment of mobile technologies to facilitate inquiry process.