UC Irvine

STEM skills such as scientific literacy are essential to being a good citizen who is well informed in the modern informational, technological era. However, most students show little growth in their scientific knowledge throughout their college education. This dissertation aims to examine how STEM education can be improved by applying motivation theory, with an emphasis on the social component, and web 2.0 technologies. Through three studies, different technology applications are implemented across different modes of instruction from face-to-face to online to examine the efficacy of these tools for enhancing student engagement and motivation. Study one integrated Google Documents with collaborative problem based learning in an university science course. Students writing and collaboration techniques were examined with computational linguistic and discourse software and results revealed that the equality of contributions between students were linked to greater science vocabulary use and analytical thinking. Study two applied a voluntary social media application, Facebook Messenger, to a general education science course with weekly text prompts from the instructor. Students reported enjoyment of this supplemental communications tool and engaged with it extensively. Student’s type of engagement, social interactions, within the application was predictive of course achievement. Finally, the third study utilized Google Hangouts as a voluntary resource for students in an online science course. Students demonstrated lower engagement with this application and reported using other social media tools. Both students’ sense of belongingness and their use of an additional social media application were predictive of self-efficacy in the course, which served as a mediator for course achievement. The affordances and implications of the addition of these different web 2.0 applications and how they can best be leveraged in the STEM classroom are discussed further in this dissertation.