Keywords

1 Introduction

The National Science Foundation (NSF) began to use the term “STEM” in the 1990s, which represents the abbreviations for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math [1]. With the announcement of the “Education Innovation Plan” by former US President Obama in 2010, STEM has further drawn educators’ attention (House, 2010). Many pieces of research and policy reports have indicated the demand of STEM education. Even, some countries believe STEM education is a crucial factor to maintain the competitiveness in the global economy [2,3,4]. Furthermore, Yakman [5] proposed that arts should be included in STEM to become STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) which help students to build engineering background with artistic aesthetics, particularly for engineering design.

Moreover, according to the employment forecast report issued by the U.S. Department of Labor [6], it revealed that employment opportunities in future jobs will be inextricably related to STEM-related occupations which will massively increase from 2016 to 2026. However, to our best knowledge, few studies have focused on developing a sound evaluation model corresponding to five disciplines of STEAM activities [7]. Therefore, this study aims to develop a model that includes those actions of learn, use, practice, design and apply based on the intrinsic objective of STEAM education.

2 Method

2.1 The Design of a LUPDA Evaluation Model

STEM education has become a global education trend. As a result, both formal learning environments and informal learning environments have launched STEM education-related courses. No matter in which learning environment, instructors always need to plan a series of related learning activities to increase cross-field knowledge so as to cultivate students’ interdisciplinary skills [8, 9].

This study identified the actions to be taken by students in STAEM activities as five types: learning, using, practicing, designing, and applying, which correspond to science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics respectively.

  1. 1.

    Science is the main subject for students to master scientific knowledge and scientific laws to form a scientific spirit.

  2. 2.

    Technology is the concretization of science, that is, learners’ ability to master, apply, and invent technology.

  3. 3.

    Engineering refers to the practical application of technology, which means that learners can use technology to carry out a systematic development process and able to evaluate or reflect.

  4. 4.

    Art asks learners to be innovate and able to think about design with the ingredient of aesthetics.

  5. 5.

    Mathematics is that learners must master the knowledge of mathematics as a foundation to synthesize other abilities.

The detailed descriptions are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. LUPDA evaluation model.
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2.2 Model Design

To measure these STEAM objectives and students’ skills, this study defines five actions taken by students through learn, use, practice, design, and apply in STEAM activities.

In this study, we invited several researchers and experts to review the assessment principles in scoring until consensus being reached. At the same time, they have piloted and reviewed the rubric, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Rubric for LUPDA evaluation model.
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3 Experimental Design

3.1 Participants

This study participants were fifth and sixth-grade students from five primary schools in South Taiwan. A total of 30 volunteers were recruited to participate in training workshop on the Micro:bit-Obstacle Avoidance Car (see Fig. 1). The participants were asked to complete a series of learning activities that are the hands-on activities related the STEAM education. Because five students could not complete the experimental procedure, their experimental data were deemed invalid and eliminated. To ensure that all groups can able to complete the specific tasks, other 25 students (17 males and 11 females) were assigned to different groups according to their prior knowledge, and each group is three to four students.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Micro:bit-Obstacle avoidance car.

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3.2 STEAM Activity

In this study, the STEAM learning activity was designed as five-phased projects centered on the micro:bit-Obstacle Avoidance Car. The activity tasks are divided into five projects. The tasks classified according to the difficulty mentioned above, and the difficulty are organized from easy to difficult. As shown in Table 3, this activity conducted students a progressive way (from easy to difficult). Through this course, students can have basic knowledge and concepts of programming.

Table 3. The task of Micro:bit-Obstacle avoidance car in STEAM activity.
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4 LUPDA for the Micro:Bit-Obstacle Avoidance Car Activity

4.1 Evaluation Implementation

This study develops a scoring rubrics for the Micro:bit-Obstacle Avoidance Car Activity based on the LUPDA model. To pilot and review the LUPDA model and rubrics, researchers and experts repeatedly revised the model based on Micro:bit-Obstacle Avoidance Car Activity. Table 4 shows the LUPDA model with a detailed assessment principle of this example.

Table 4. LUPDA for Micro:bit-Obstacle avoidance car activity.
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5 Discussion and Conclusion

With the development of STEAM education-related practices, educators need to evaluate student work that does not rely on traditional knowledge and is not limited to specific activities. This study’s contribution provides a framework called LUPDA, which helps educators understand students’ interdisciplinary integration and measure students’ learning performance in STEAM. Nevertheless, in terms of the required resources and the applicability of education, to realize the LUPDA framework applies to multiple STEAM activities, the measure remains to be solved.