Students’ Attitudes towards STEM Education: Voices from Indonesian Junior High Schools

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate Indonesian students’ attitudes towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) through survey study. Data collected from 260 Indonesian junior high school students (47.3% male and 52.7% female) who were studying at public school in East Java province. The Attitudes Towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (AT-STEM) questionnaire was developed with Indonesian language and validated through an exploratory factor analysis of participants’ responses. In addition, the Pearson product moment was used to measure the correlation among four dimensions of scale. The results indicated that, first, the instrument used in this study had satisfactory validity and reliability. The construct validities of the AT-STEM were varying from .60 and .96 and explained 86.84% of the variance. Overall, the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the instrument was .94. Second, the dimension of Mathematics came in the first rank and followed by Science as well as the degree of attitudes towards STEM. Last, the results also showed a significant interrelationship among dimensions of attitudes towards STEM.