DESIGNING STEM ORGANIC CHEMISTRY THEME TO DEVELOP GRADE 12th STUDENTS’ COMPETENCES IN APPLYING THEIR LEARNED KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS

Abstract

STEM education is known as the new approach for educating and training the future human resource. It lays emphasis on the connection among 4 fields, namely Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. It has been widely deployed in high schools to develop student competences. This is also the ultimate goal of the general education program issued in 2018. This article briefly introduces the STEM education, applying the 5E model to design the theme “Plastic from Milk” to teach Chemistry in grade 12^th. We performed the pedagogical experiment at Lai Vung 2 High School, Dong Thap Province (involving 84 12^thgrade students) by organizing extracurricular activities under the theme “Plastic from Milk”. The students’ improved competencies in applying their learned knowledge, skills, are measured by the theme outputs, tests, and observation sheet. The obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed method.