Examining the Effects of STEM and Authentic STEM Approaches in Teaching a Sustainability Module on Middle School Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

Global issues such as poverty, energy crises and climate change necessitate that Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines be addressed collectively in line with the sustainable development goals. In this context, STEM education emerges as a key component of sustainability education. However, research is limited on whether authentic STEM, when used to teach sustainability topics, provides an additional contribution to students’ critical thinking skills compared to STEM teaching. The objective of this study is to examine changes in the critical thinking skills of 7th-grade secondary school students following instruction using STEM and Authentic STEM approaches within a sustainability module. A pre-test–post-test quasi-experimental design was used in the study. The participants in the study comprised a total of 69 seventh-grade students taking an environmental education course at a state secondary school. The students were divided into three groups: a control group receiving textbook-based instruction, a STEM group and an Authentic STEM group. The students’ critical thinking skills were measured before and after the implementation, and the data were analyzed using a two-way mixed ANOVA and follow-up comparisons. The findings revealed a significant time effect on critical thinking scores [F(1,66) = 111.101, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.627] and a time × group interaction [F(2,66) = 25.531, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.436]. Follow-up comparisons showed that the changes in critical thinking scores among students in the STEM and Authentic STEM groups differed significantly from those in the control group. However, no statistically significant difference was found between the changes in scores of the STEM and Authentic STEM groups. These findings suggest that STEM-based teaching within the scope of sustainability education may be associated with the development of critical thinking skills among secondary school students. Nonetheless, the findings do not provide statistical evidence that the Authentic STEM approach was associated with greater pretest-to-posttest gains in critical thinking than STEM teaching.