Exploring Student Engagement in STEM Education through the Engineering Design Process

While the engineering is expected to be a catalyst for integrated STEM education, engineering is also problematic, especially in countries with a fixed and centralized curriculum such as Japan. Therefore, translating the framework of integrated STEM into practice and exploring students’ engagement are essential. This study explored students’ engagement in STEM activities through the Engineering Design Process (EDP) in an elective science class. Our participants were sixteen students (aged 14–15) in a Japanese junior high school (JHS) that chose to participate for one semester. Through a single case study, we analyzed the students’ engagement with the activities from the individual and group perspectives. Data from self-assessments, worksheets, presentations, and videos of lessons were collected and analyzed. The results showed that the students’ level of engagement was very high. Exploration with co-occurrence network analysis showed that students’ engagement was associated with the topic of the activity, designing activity, and students’ relationships with their peers. An engineering element in an elective science class was valuable for JHS students and provided a way to enhance science lessons. Also, EPD facilitated essential skills in design and collaboration. Further research in balancing group and individual perspectives is needed.


INTRODUCTION
Even though STEM education is widely accepted as making a significant contribution to education (Chacko et al., 2015;English, 2017a;Hartini et al., 2020;Krajcik & Delen, 2017;NGSS Lead States, 2013), the majority of countries in Asia (such as Japan, China, and Indonesia) do not have a firm commitment to providing STEM education by law. Since the school system in Asian countries tends to follow a fixed curriculum, the integration of new insight in education faces a big challenge (Lee et al., 2019). The boundaries around each subject in the curriculum create a fundamental dilemma (Leung, 2020) that has been identified as the terminology of system science which identified that science is not a single subject but interconnected with others subjects (Mayer & Kumano, 1999 Guzey, 2020). The adapted framework of the EDP is provided in Figure 1.  Figure 2.

Introduction to the Research Site
The study was conducted in a JHS in Shizuoka prefecture in Japan.

Characteristics of participants
Sixteen ninth-grade students (ten boys and six girls) who had voluntarily applied for the elective science class were chosen as our research participants.
These students were very interested in science. They divided themselves into four groups, and the composition of the groups remained the same for 12 meetings. The classroom was designed to facilitate interaction among the students in their groups throughout the activities.

Curricular Context
Considering that STEM activity through EDP was new for the students, the first, second, and third meetings were

Data sources and analysis
The primary data were collected from group worksheets, group presentations, and students' selfassessments (Table 1)

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this section, the results of our analysis are presented. Evidence related to each research question is presented and discussed.
RQ 1: How well do the students engage overall in the STEM activities through the EDP steps?
The findings about the students' engagement are summarized in Figure 3. Group work could support student's engagement higher than lecture (Shernoff, et al, 2003).

たくさんのアイデアを総合して考えられた。協力すればいいものも 作れる。
I have many ideas about the project. By working together with my group, we bring the ideas into the real boat. (Groups are named A-D; students are numbered 1-16) The words that the students used most frequently and that were central in their understanding of their engagement can be seen clearly. Figure 4 shows that students used the words "wind speed" and "collaboration" most frequently to explain their engagement with the wind activity. Moreover, in Figure 5, the words "collaboration," "group," and "share" are central(sources). This analysis shows that students' engagement was consistently  Table 2. Furthermore, Figure   5 showed that the dynamic group work greatly influenced students' engagement in the STEM activities. The opportunity to work in groups allowed students to share their ideas, opinions, and designs. This result is in line with previous research, which found that through their engagement in EDP, students enhanced their communication and collaboration skills (Krajcik & Delen, 2017). These results show that engineering design tasks completed in small groups taught students science concepts and allowed them to engage in productive thinking (Guzey, 2020). Thus, the EDP activity successfully engaged the students and allowed them to be actively involved in the activity.

Question Research 2: How well do individual students engage in the STEM activities through the EDP steps?
After the students had finished the wind and solar activities, they answered questions designed to measure quantitatively the implementation of the EDP and identify which steps of the EDP were difficult. The first part of the selfassessment instrument was a dichotomous item where the students were asked whether they accomplished each EDP step during the project.
Descriptive statistics were performed, and the results are provided in Figure 6.
To keep the analysis focused, 70% was the cut-off to determine whether a    This project also had an outdoor activity for two meetings (100 minutes), during which the students measured wind speed and drone activity.
Since the teacher did not specify some aspects of the Learn step, students Jurnal Penelitian dan Pembelajaran IPA Sulaeman, et al Vol. 7, No. 1, 2021, p. 1-16 11 had the perspective that they were designing the solution but not learning specific science concepts. In the Solar project (Videos 7 to 12), the solar boat project involved more complicated hands-on activities, and the use of solar panels provided a deeper understanding of the mechanism of the sun as the source of energy. Therefore, students' engagement in the Learn step was better.
However, one group did not successfully build their boat. This affected their perception of the Test step.
From the analysis of each EDP step, it appeared that failure in a hands-on activity, such as designing the solarpowered boat, could influence students' engagement. Therefore, when the students failed to design their engagement tend to decrease. The fluctuation of students' engagement influence by their success in hands-on activity.