Teaching Environmental Sustainability Topics with Flipped Learning Model Enriched with STEM Activities

This study aims to reveal the effect of the flipped learning model enriched with STEM activities on students' cognitive structures related to environmental sustainability concepts and to present the design, implementation, and evaluation processes of these activities. The study group consisted of 28 female students in the eighth-grade of secondary school. Word Association Test was used as a data collection tool. In the analysis of the word association tests, the cut-off points were determined by creating a frequency table of the number of words written by the students about the concepts in the word association tests. It was determined that there was a difference between the students' answers to the key concepts given in the word association test (waste, garbage, recycling, reuse, recovery, environmental pollution, sustainability) in the pre-test (f= 611) and post-test (f= 1943) and that they frequently included various concepts in the post-test that they did not include in the pre-test. In addition, it was revealed that the key concepts were meaningfully associated with the activity topics of the research in the post-test. In line with the findings obtained, it was concluded that the students' previously existing weak cognitive structures towards the concepts related to environmental sustainability improved after the activities.