Abstract:

The advances in the automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) require Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) development skills. Today’s elementary school pupils should have an early start in STEM and should be adequately educated for future labour market. Among other STEM skills, they should be educated in computational thinking (CT), computer science, and robotics. The CT and computer programming skills are especially important because the software makes the brain of the automation, robotics, and AI.
In this paper author presents the results of the research of the primary education prospective teachers' opinion of STEM education in the primary education of the Republic of Croatia.
The aim of this research is to find out the opinion of the primary education prospective teachers about their own knowledge of STEM, about their interest in STEM and whether they think that STEM is important for the elementary school pupils’ education.
The research hypotheses are:
Hypothesis 1: Primary education prospective teachers would like to learn more about STEM.
Hypothesis 2: Primary education prospective teachers believe that STEM is important for the elementary school pupils’ education.
The survey participants were 109 (106 female and 3 male) primary education prospective teachers - the students of University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Teacher Education. The data were collected in January and February 2020. using the anonymous online Google Forms questionnaire prepared by the author. Statistical analysis (including One Sample t Test) was performed using the free and open source statistical software GNU PSPP, version 1.0.1. (https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/).
The research results show that on the scale of 1 to 5 (1-poor to 5-excellent), the primary education prospective teachers self-evaluate their current knowledge of STEM as M=2.73. It shows that there is a room for improvement of their knowledge of STEM.
On the Likert scale (1-strongly disagree to 5-strongly agree) they would like to learn more about STEM (M=4.01, t=11.23, sig. < 0.05), and their opinion is that STEM is important for elementary school pupils’ education (M=4.12, t=14.79, sig. < 0.05). Both hypotheses are confirmed.
Author concludes that the primary education prospective teachers are interested in STEM and that they should learn more STEM subjects in their university education so that they can be more competent in teaching STEM skills in their classes, especially skills concerning CT, computer programming, and robotics.

Keywords:

STEM, primary education, prospective teachers.