Exploring Vietnamese Students’ Participation and Perceptions of Science Classroom Environment in STEM Education Context

One of the concerns for applying STEM education in the classroom is students’ participation. In this study, the Engagement and Participation in Classroom – Science (EPIC-S) questionnaire was applied to explore Vietnamese students’ participation behaviors and their perceptions of the science classroom environment. The main goal of our study was to investigate the impact of students’ classroom participation on their perceptions of the science classroom environment as assessed by the EPIC-S questionnaire. Our survey was conducted on 884 students in some public secondary schools in Vietnam and the collected data was analyzed using SPSS 20. Students were classified into two groupsverbal and silent based on how they participated in several facets of the science classroom environment. We found no statistically significant difference between these two groups in their perception of the relationship with the teacher. Nevertheless, there are differences in their perceptions of peer support, fear of embarrassment, and teacher openness. Our results will contribute to the theoretical background for STEM education in Vietnam.


INTRODUCTION
The classroom is one of the most familiar environments for the formal learning process. It is a crucial context where teachers and students may interact face-to-face. Classroom environment refers to the physical, psychological, and social contexts which have "impacts on the performance of students in the classroom" (Fraser et al., 1996;Fraser, 1998). Prior studies showed that several facets of classroom environment had significant impact on students' participation and motivation in the classroom. Some factors such as class size, instructor's personality, relationship and connection with classmates affected whether or not students would speak up in class or engage in classroom discussion Davis, 2003;den Brok et al., 2010;Ghalley & Rai, 2019;Kaylene et al., 2011). Students' perception of the classroom environment is crucial to students' participation in the classroom (Ryan & Patrick, 2001;Susak, 2016).
On the other hand, students may benefit more on learning in the class if they are active in the classroom (Jurik et al., 2013;Wade, 1994). Some studies have also stated that active students who are verbally engaged in classroom would have better academic achievement and revealed higher satisfaction in the learning process compared to passive students (Freeman et al., 2014;Ghalley & Rai, 2019;Pratton & Hales, 1986;Tsay & Brady, 2010;Webb, 2009;Wells & Arauz, 2006). Students' participation in the classroom can be recognized via their explicit behaviours or performance during the class time. One of the ways students participate in the class is using words or verbal performance in which students use language to express their thoughts and ideas (Jurik et al., 2013;Liu, 2001). In other way, students may also take notes, listen, pose questions, express opinions, or answer teacher's questions (Abdullah et al., 2012b;Bas, 2010). In terms of verbal engagement, students who participate in class by asking questions, giving opinions, answering questions, engaging in classroom talk are classified as verbal students, while those who just listen and take notes are classified as silent students (Jen et al., 2017;Mustapha et al., 2010).
The expectation of engaging students to have verbal performance more and more in classroom is of great importance (Chang & Brickman, 2018;Chin, 2006;Pimentel & Mcneill, 2013).
It is noteworthy that Asian students are usually silent in class (Kim, 2011;Liu, 2001 were considered idle in the classroom and their data were excluded from analysis. Among the participating students, those who had a mean score on VP higher than 3.0 were classified as verbal participation and those who had a mean score on VP lower than 3.0 were classified as silent participation (Jen et al., 2017). This classification principle allowed us to distinguish the silent participating students who are nonverbal but participate in class by taking notes or listening from the nonparticipating students who barely performed any behaviors in class. Due to this selection, the sample size of verbal and silent students was reduced.

Validation of the Vietnamese EPIC-S
The sample size of data subset 1 (n = 468) was adequate for EFA, as  (Jen et al., 2017).
According to the results shown in  (Kaendler et al., 2015;Kelly, 2007). Besides, teachers may create a learning environment in which students feel safe and comfortable to express their ideas without worrying of being judged or blamed for their opinions.