Abstract
Contemporary society expects learners to synthesize large amounts of available information and take advantage of interdisciplinary knowledge to tackle complex, real-world issues. STEAM education aims to cultivate students' ability to solve such problems through interdisciplinary thinking but is often represented by courses that are merely disjointed arrays of school subjects. On the other hand, Maker education harnesses society's enthusiasm for technological innovation and creativity but overlooks the scientific principles that underpin these processes. This research presents a novel elementary school course informed by the interdisciplinary principles of STEAM, integrated with Maker's focus on technology and creativity. The course design also utilized engineering design as a meta-thematic framework. A total of 164 third-grade pupils participated in the research, with responses analyzed using descriptive statistical methods. The findings indicated that the integrated design of the course promoted pupils' learning motivation, self-efficacy, and acquisition of interdisciplinary knowledge. These effects were not gender-specific and demonstrate the potential applicability of a STEAM/Maker integrated approach to curriculum design in other settings.
Highlights
As the information age gives way to the comprehensive age (Cai, 2011), learners are increasingly required to synthesize large amounts of information and employ interdisciplinary knowledge to solve complex real-world problems (Nadelson and Seifert, 2017)
This paper reports the results of our first round of development, which including the following questions: (a) How can we design curriculum framework with the integration of STEAM and Maker based on the idea of engineering design? (b) How can we develop a curriculum based on the framework? (c) How to evaluate the effectiveness of the development curriculum?
The mean values for the dimensions of total score, attention, relevance, and satisfaction were all >3, the boys score slightly higher than girls, indicating the high level of students’ learning motivation after the course had ended, and the boys were marginally more interested in such integrated courses, which indicated that the courses’ overall ability to adapt to the learning needs of boys and girls
Summary
As the information age gives way to the comprehensive age (Cai, 2011), learners are increasingly required to synthesize large amounts of information and employ interdisciplinary knowledge to solve complex real-world problems (Nadelson and Seifert, 2017). Complex Problem Solving (CPS) is deemed to be a key cross-curricular skill of the 21st century (Herde et al, 2016). Much formal education has traditionally been premised on the division of knowledge into discrete subject areas. The division of knowledge into disciplines is conducive to scientific research (Morrison et al, 2009), it detaches formal education from the real world, meaning learners may fail to apply the knowledge they have learned to resolve practical issues. This, in turn, leads to the emergence of the phenomenon of “useless knowledge” (Linn and Hsi, 2000).
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