Abstract
A promising way to bring STEAM (STEM enriched with Arts) into classrooms is the Professional Development (PD) path. Its main difference to a usual PD lies in the introduction of creativity with its social skills rather than just on cognitive learning, and thus in STEAM teaching, teachers need training in new ways of teaching. In order to establish STEAM in everyday school life, an effective PD is required to go beyond one-time interventions, which seldom work sustainably. After our course schedule, the participating teachers were supposed to apply their expertise in their next school year’s classroom. The provided material ensured the teachers to work regularly with STEAM, and as the involved teachers were supposed to recapitulate and consolidate their STEAM skills in their classroom work. Following the PD goals, the students (N = 550) of the participating teachers were monitored for scientific motivation and creativity in order to examine the PD effects. For the analysis, we calculated canonical correlations to confirm the association between creativity and motivation. The structural equation model (SEM) confirmed the model that with STEAM creativity has a positive effect on motivation: A long-term PD that is integrated into school life is an appropriate socio-cultural sustainability entry to promote creativity in classrooms. Through creativity, apparently, students’ self-efficacy increase. In conclusion, integrating creativity into education via PD works and may provide a promising channel to multiplication into further science classrooms, which is discussed in the conclusions.
Highlights
The keyword “STEM integrating arts and creativity (STEAM)” refers to the integration of arts (A) and creativity in the classical STEM teaching (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)
As motivation and cognitive achievement correlate strongly even cognitive success profits from STEAM (Conradty & Bogner, 2019). These findings suggest what qualities are needed in STEM: “Flow” is a mental state of creativity, in which a person performs an activity while fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000)
Effects of STEAM resulting in changes of motivation and creativity Effects of the STEAM intervention were examined using the level of changes in the factor level between pre- and post-test
Summary
The keyword “STEAM” refers to the integration of arts (A) and creativity in the classical STEM teaching (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). STEAM is assumed to enhance science lessons by making them more attractive, creativity is in general associated more with artists than with engineers. STEM curricula may benefit from the integration of arts or creative aspects, encouraging creative solutions rather than to get ready solutions presented (Henriksen, 2014). It is already the case that syllabi recommend STEAM teaching. Professional Development initiatives should help teaching staff to stimulate structural change. What makes creativity so attractive that an educational structural change is demanded? What can teachers achieve in the conflict between the cognitive learning goals of curricula and new demands for creativity? What makes creativity so attractive that an educational structural change is demanded? What can teachers achieve in the conflict between the cognitive learning goals of curricula and new demands for creativity? How effective is Professional Development? Given these questions, the present study was built up
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