The Future of Education

A STEAM-based learning unit was designed to promote high school students’ understanding of a ceramic concept. There are four lesson plans in the learning unit that consisted of four topics of the ceramic concept: an introduction to the ceramic, properties and production processes of the ceramic, ceramic production, and a study of ceramic efficiency. Learning activities in each lesson plan were created using STEAM-based learning as a framework. The learning unit was implemented to 28 Thai high school students in the Talent Enrichment Program (TEP) who enrolled in an advanced chemistry elective course and collected data using one group pretest-posttest design. This research aims to study students' understanding of the ceramic concept after the implementation of the STEAM-based learning unit. A Ceramic Conceptual Test (CCT) was designed to be a tool for collecting data before and after implementation with a reliability score of 0.71. The descriptive statistics use in this research were mean and standard deviation. The results were interpreted using mean comparison and the relative gain scores as hypothesis statistics. The result from the mean comparison shows that the average posttest score (10.32±1.49) was significantly higher than the average pretest score (5.64±1.57), which was statistically different at the .05 level. The results for the relative gain scores indicate that the majority of the students have developed their understanding of the ceramic concept at a moderate level. This learning unit can be utilized to be a practical STEAM-based activity in chemistry for high school students.

Keywords: Ceramic, High School Chemistry, Relative gain score, STEAM-Based learning, Students’ Understanding.