Enhancing STEM Project Instructional Competence: A Short Training Camp for Secondary School Teachers in Thailand

STEM education is essential, yet the lack of STEM teachers is prevalent in many educational sectors, including Thailand. This study investigated the effects of a short-term training camp focusing on STEM projects on secondary STEM teachers' instructional competence. The main training activities in this program are workshops about the STEM process and hands-on activities where participants practice being mentors for students' STEM projects. On the first and the last day of the program, participants were assessed using the multiple-choice questions for the content knowledge and the self-evaluation form with Likert-scale questions for the skills and attitudes. Eight participants with the most and least improvement test scores were invited to join a semi-structured interview. The quantitative data from 29 participants were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The results show that all aspects of participants' instructional competence significantly improved after the program. The data from the interviews also support the findings and reveal that workshops and hands-on activities are the keys to their improvement.