Abstract:

In the 21st century changing innovative ecosystems, scientific and technological oriented innovations have significantly and progressively developed into urgent in order to meet the needs of the challenges in the competitive knowledge-based economy. Most of the institutions’ workforce demands have transformed from manpower to mind power, which can be cultivated in the best educational institutions, mainly at the universities. In order to be successful, university students need to improve seriously their capabilities in Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) to high levels. Hence, the strategic assessment is needed to understand the talents and skills of these students, especially those who are women and minorities due to the fact that they are usually kept from pursuing math and science careers.

The Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) Assessment has developed to understand the talent, skills and drawbacks of the people between 16 and 35.The STEM Assessment reports give also the chances to understand strategically the participants’ talents, skills, aptitudes, potentials, performance capacities, strengths, opportunities, treats, and weaknesses related to the demands of the innovative and technological works and industries.

While creating this assessment, systematic deep interviews were conducted with the experts of the innovation-based economies, the HR Departments of the well-known corporations and the university professors in different fields, such as Information Technology, Life Sciences, Biotechnology, Automotive, and Oil and Gas. Then, the critical literature review was methodologically done to develop the items for the assessment. In terms of the content validity, fifteen experts’ recommendations in different fields had taken into consideration in order to decide the final version of the scale. In the STEM Assessment, the 160 items was systematically assessed with a five-point scale in the study sample consisted of 2,500 undergraduate students (%56were female) from six different universities and three senior high school students in Turkey.

In the results, item-total correlation test, comparisons for upper and lower 45 % groups, exploratory factor analysis and Alpha coefficient were used for psychometric examination. All items had factor loadings more than 0.65. Cronbach’s α for the entire scale was 0.97, with subscales ranging from 0.86 to 0.98. In terms of the internal consistency each of the scales reinforced critically the results of factor analysis, showing that the results were significantly consistent.

In conclusion, the results STEM Assessment is found reliable and valid for measuring systematically talents, skills, aptitudes, potentials, performance capacities, strengths, opportunities, treats, and weaknesses for the young people (between 16-35) since the psychometric quality of the instrument had proved high quality in the assessment of the Science Technology Engineering Math talents, skills, aptitudes, potentials, performance capacities, strengths, opportunities, treats, and weaknesses.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Stem Education, Assessment Of Stem, Vocational Training, Career Counseling, Innovation Management.