A Semantic Network Analysis on the Recognition of STEAM by Middle School Students in South Korea

The purpose of this study is to investigate how much Korean students recognize STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics) and to find out what keywords they associate with it and what the relationships among keywords mean. This study has surveyed 1,009 middle school students by using the purposive sampling method. In order to achieve the goal of this study, we have developed a questionnaire in consultation with survey research experts. The questionnaire asks each student to write down three words that come to his or her mind in each area of study: S/T/E/A/M. The survey was conducted during the period between July and September, 2016, and the results were collected directly from the target groups. For data analysis, KrKwic was used for selecting top 30 keywords, and Ucinet6.0 was employed to obtain meaningful relationships among keywords in the whole network. Then we built and visualized a network by using Netdraw. In this study the contents of analysis include the frequency of keywords, the network degree centralization index. The results of this study can be summarized as follows: First, the words students associate with science are "experiment, chemistry, physics, scientist, biology, life, etc." Second, the words students associate with technology are "machine, home economics, robot, science,, invention, technician, etc." Third, the words students associate with engineering are "machine, technology, robot, computer, mechanical engineering, science, college of engineering, engineer, etc." Fourth, the words students associate with the arts are "art, music, painting, beauty, dancing, song, dance in Korean, etc." Fifth, the words students associate with math are "calculation, function, numbers, difficulty, equation, formula, etc." Sixth, With regard to STEAM, middle school students recognize science as experiment, technology and engineering as machine, arts as art, math as calculation. Seventh, Each network of STEAM turns out to be a complicated one. It is difficult to find a meaningful creation of images due to their lack of learning experience in combined knowledge. This explains the need of learning experience in the STEAM programs. The fact that all of middle school students consider STEAM difficult supports this explanation.