An Interdisciplinary Research: USTEAM Approach & BWG Assessment in Online Courses

Abstract

Real life jobs need interdisciplinary skills and educations should be adjusted in a way that students obtain these skills in their education lives. Designing interdisciplinary online courses seems to be unavoidable in educational institutions to have the technological and innovational catch-up in the 21st century. This paper includes a discussion about the importance of the assessment methods and presents BWG assessment method as an option. It is measuring students' success in three factors with BWG Assessment: Behavioral Success, Work Success and Group Success. A teaching method, as an alternative to STEM and STEAM approaches, combining the expertise of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math with specialized, student-centered Unique projects called USTEAM was delivered to lycée students' for 9 months. To find students' attitude towards this new method USTEAM Attitude test is used. Descriptive Statistics, Compare Means and General Linear Models were used in IBM SPSS Statistics 25 for analyzing the data obtained from BWG pretest and BWG posttest marks of the Standard Online Courses and the USTEAM Online Courses. Results was awarding parts of the study and success was more than what was expected. Although some students were aggressive at the beginning toward being a member of USTEAM groups, they were more motivated by assuring that they didn't have any competitors and they were expected to produce their Unique projects regardless of what others do! For motivation theorists, the results from this study provide evidence that interdisciplinary cultural influences in courses can be expressed in diverse educational settings. For educators, this study underlines the importance of cooperative and creative USTEAM activities in online courses.