Abstract
Many current curricula, in going beyond traditional goals, increasingly foster creativity in science classrooms, declaring creativity a core skill of the 21st century. For enhancing creativity in science classrooms, the subject Arts is considered to offer a potential way from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) to STEAM (STEM with Arts)). The Horizont-2020 project Creations prepared more than 100 creativity-enhancing STEAM modules based on the 5E instructional model. STEM subjects were mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry or technology, and often interdisciplinary for different school and class levels between the ages of nine and nineteen. All modules provided a social environment fostering creativity where students imagine, explore, experiment, test, manipulate, and speculate. Exemplarily, five modules including physics, math, and biology, were selected, for monitoring motivation and creativity. The first was measured on the level of career-motivation and self-efficacy, the latter focused on two sub-constructs: active cognition such as idea processing (Act), and a mental state of creative immersion (Flow). Subjects were a sample of 995 students (9–18 years). In summary, no gender impact or age effect appeared in any of the monitored variables. Participation intervened with Self-Efficacy and Act, while Career Motivation or Flow did not. Act as a cognitive variable associated with creativity might be more sensitive to changes, whereas Flow as a parameter measuring a state of mind related to emotion appears more stable. Path analysis supported the role of creativity for Career-Motivation by promoting Self-Efficacy. Conclusions for appropriate educational settings to foster STEAM environments are discussed.
Highlights
While in the 20th century the main research struggle was to define creativity appropriately [1], despite all the complexity of the construct, this is certain: creativity is a pivotal competence to solve current problems and to meet the requirements of the post-industrial age [2]: the young generation needs to rediscover creativity with its mental flexibility and joy to experiment
Act as a cognitive variable associated with creativity might be more sensitive to changes, whereas Flow as a parameter measuring a state of mind related to emotion appears more stable
As STEAM education is supposed to foster intrinsic motivation, we focused on self-efficacy and career motivation
Summary
While in the 20th century the main research struggle was to define creativity appropriately [1], despite all the complexity of the construct, this is certain: creativity is a pivotal competence to solve current problems and to meet the requirements of the post-industrial age [2]: the young generation needs to rediscover creativity with its mental flexibility and joy to experiment. Arts was reduced to a mere element of subject teaching, ignoring more or less the essence of creativity rather than using it as an element of learning across all classroom subjects [4]. Nowadays, counteracting this trend, curricula increasingly promote “ability”.
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