Abstract
<p style="text-align:justify">For United States of America (USA) and other developed countries, science achievement gaps begin to emerge in elementary and primary school. Such gaps between USA student groups typically are connected to socio-economic status (SES) and issues such as students still learning the English language. Through an experimental design, this National Science Foundation funded study explores how integrating the arts into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curriculum and leading with a more STEAM-first approach (e.g., curriculum which integrates science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) might provide more equitable science learning opportunities for elementary or primary grade level students. More specifically, the project’s research efforts seek to also examine how integrating the arts into science instruction might help emerging bilingual (EB) students who are simultaneously learning the English language and science. Although results provide somewhat conflicting findings of statistical significance with small to moderate effect sizes, outcomes provide initial evidence that leading with STEAM science instruction before STEM efforts can be beneficial to early readers, and for EB students this benefit is magnified. As the title of this study suggest, sometimes finding nothing is something.</p>
Highlights
Part of a large-scale longitudinal National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research initiative in the United States of America (USA), this study investigates the efficacy of integrating the arts into instruction of generation science standards (NGSS, 2013)
With a vision toward increasing science literacy for all students, while taking advantage of the potential benefits of arts-integrated science education and simultaneously providing equitable access to the arts, this study explores how science instruction might be beneficially augmented by utilizing the arts as an equitable alternative or supplementation to STEM approaches for elementary science instruction
Is it possible the STEAM-first methods aided in decreasing cognitive load and making abstract concepts more concrete and accessible through multimodality and embodied representation as researchers have suggested (Campbell et al, 2016; Wahyuningsih et al, 2020)? As the results of this study documented, when it comes to fourth grade Title I and EB students learning earth science, a STEAMfirst approach produced higher scores in overall knowledge gains than the STEM-first approach, and for the emerging bilingual students these higher scores and knowledge gains were significantly higher than their English fluent classmates
Summary
Part of a large-scale longitudinal National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research initiative in the United States of America (USA), this study investigates the efficacy of integrating the arts into instruction of generation science standards (NGSS, 2013). The project’s research efforts seek to examine how integrating the arts into science instruction might help younger challenged readers such as emerging bilingual (EB) students who are simultaneously learning the English language and science. Historically in the USA, emerging bilingual (EB) students in the process of learning the English language in addition to one or more other languages, have typically been referred to as English language learners (ELL) or English learners (EL). While sometimes using the EL or ELL acronyms in the literature review to represent more accurately what others have reported on in their research, in this paper
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