Abstract:

Besides the academic knowledge and its transfer, STEM educational environment also contributes to the development of students' social competences. This aspect is seldom studied due to the lack of a metric toolkit that would be sufficiently efficient and at the same time easily applied by educators.

The article presents a diagnostic assessment that can be used to determine the degree of cooperation between students when performing a specific task. With its help, the degree of teamwork involvement of each student is determined. Establishing the level of involvement of each of the participants in a given team or group project (task) allows conclusions to be made about the individual contribution, as well the social skills of everyone related to cooperation. Through range of some coherent measurements of the same students, the dynamics in social competences expressed in cooperation in STEM-based learning can be traced.
The presented assessment was developed on the basis of Jacob Moreno's sociometric - a well-established socio-psychological method for quantitative assessment of relations between members of small groups.

The sociometric criteria used, reflect the specificity of cooperation among 7 to 12-year-old students. The complete version of the prototype of the assessment is presented, as well as data from the expert assessment of the content and procedural validity of the instrument.

The application procedure requires each student in a given work group to evaluate the contribution of each other during their joint work on a particular project. In this way, the objectivity of the final assessment is achieved.

The assessment can be applied to evaluation and observing key social competences of students in STEM-based education, also to plan the composition of working groups and teams in the learning process.

This would significantly support the complexity by placing an emphasis on the development of social competences related to teamwork when applying the STEM approach in schools.

Keywords:

Sociometric assessment, STEM approach, involvement, 7 to 12-year-old students, sociometric criteria, pedagogical process measurement.