STEM making: Fostering secondary students’ collaborative skills with mentor-scaffolded authentic problem solving

Collaboration is one of the vital capabilities for students in the twenty-first century. Authentic problem solving and mentoring have been recognised as efficient instructional means to promote learners' multiple competencies. In the field, there have been studies investigating the development of collaborative skills via engaging students in authentic problem-solving tasks and/or mentoring activities. However, rare work has compared these two instructional strategies: Authentic problem solving merely and with the infusion of mentorship, in terms of the effectiveness of fostering students' collaboration. To fill the research gap, this quasi-experimental study (n=63) aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the approaches of Authentic Problem Solving (APS) and Mentor-scaffolded Authentic Problem Solving (MAPS) in the context of STEM making. Results reveal that the MAPS students learning outperformed the APS students, in terms of collaboration. Implications for future work are discussed in this paper as well. Copyright © 2021 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.