Hu, Che-Wei
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology of Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education Student
E-mail:jason9676@gmail.com
Wang, Chia-Yu
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology of Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education Professor
E-mail:chiayuwang@mail.ntust.edu.tw
Abstract
This study investigated the impact of elementary school students’ science knowledge beliefs and critical skills performance by integrating a problem-based approach into the robotics curriculum. In this study, 19 elementary school students from 3-6 grader in Northern Taiwan were enrolled in a one-week, five-lesson robotics project. The Science Epistemic Beliefs Questionnaire and the Critical Skills Questionnaire were administered before and after the course, and the learning unit responses were qualitatively coded and scored to determine the performance of the robotics project. It was found that after the robotics course, the results of the scale analysis showed that the overall critical learning skills did not improve significantly. However, there was a slight increase in “problem solving”, indicating that the design of the learning sheet questions helped students to improve their problem-solving skills. In addition, there was a low significant correlation between “source” aspect in scientific epistemic beliefs and “creative thinking” and “knowledge creation efficacy” in the post-test of critical learning skills. This indicates that the more mature the students’ views on “sources of scientific knowledge”, the better their performance on “creative thinking”, and the higher their confidence in “knowledge creation” in the robotics course.
Keywords :Problem-based, Robot course, Science epistemic belief, Critical skill