STEM School Label – Case Study of the week (01/10/18 - 07/10/18).

Are you looking for methods to increase your students’ motivation towards STEM education? Do you want your students to be interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers? Then look no further than this post!

In this week, we will focus on a study that utilized virtual labs and applications from the Go-Lab Sharing and Authoring Platform (http://www.golabz.eu/). The aim of the study was to investigate whether students' engagement with computer-supported learning environments would stimulate their attitudes and motivation towards STEM. For this purpose, an interactive educational intervention consisting of three online learning environments and a questionnaire designed in the context of the Go-Lab Project were used. The online learning environments, which are called Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs), were selected from the Go-Lab Sharing and Authoring Platform and were adapted for the needs of the study.

The participants of the study were 14 eleventh graders (16-17 years old) from a public secondary technical school (A Technical School of Limassol) in Limassol, Cyprus. Students completed the activities of the three Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) during their physics course and the duration of the implementation was 3 teaching periods of 45 minutes.  The implementation took place in the e-Learning Lab and each student had its own workstation. The teacher acted as a facilitator and students worked at their own pace and were responsible for the procedure they had to follow and for the completion of all the required tasks in the given period of time.

The data collection involved a questionnaire measuring students’ attitudes and motivation towards STEM education, which was administered before and after the implementation. The questionnaire consisted of 21 items in 5-point Likert scale (1=Strongly disagree and 5=Strongly agree) from which 9 items were measuring Learning STEM at School, 5 items Practical Work in STEM, 3 items STEM Outside of School and 4 items STEM Career Motivation. In addition, at the end of the implementation the teacher wrote down notes about the progress of his students as they completed the activities of the three ILSs.

The data analysis revealed that students agree that computer-supported inquiry learning though Go-Lab makes STEM learning and understanding easier for them, helps them to understand the work of scientists and researchers and increase their interest to involve in scientific discussions with their classmates. In addition, students indicated their willingness to pursue a STEM career and they acknowledge the use of inquiry skills in their future career. Regarding the comments of the teacher, students understood better the basic concepts of the electrical circuits and that was obvious from the learning products that they created in the learning environment, i.e. hypotheses, experimental designs, virtual experiments etc. 


The implementation was so successful, that the author Mr Achillefs Kapartzianis won an innovation award at a local competition in Cyprus. If you want to find more information about the case study, visit the case study page. Are you interested in using the Go-Lab ecosystem in your own classroom? You can visit the Go-Lab support area, where you will find various materials to help you navigate and use the Go-Lab Ecosystem.