Abstract
With the increasing shift from STEM to STEAM education, arts-based approaches to science teaching and learning are considered promising for aligning school science curricula with the development of twenty-first century skills, including creativity. Yet the impact of STEAM practices on student creativity and specifically on how the latter is associated with science learning outcomes have thus far received scarce empirical support. This paper contributes to this line of research by reporting on a two-wave quantitative study that examines the effect of a long-term STEAM intervention on two cognitive processes associated with creativity (act, flow) and their interrelationships with intrinsic and extrinsic components of science motivation. Using pre- and post-survey data from 175 high-school students in Italy, results show an overall positive effect of the intervention both on the act subscale of creativity and science career motivation, whereas a negative effect is found on self-efficacy. Gender differences in the above effects are also observed. Further, results provide support for the mediating role of self-efficacy in the relationship between creativity and science career motivation. Implications for the design of STEAM learning environments are discussed.
Highlights
Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on the added benefits of arts-based approaches in inquiry science teaching and learning (Buck et al, 2019; Chappell et al, 2019; Conradty & Bogner, 2019)
Participants The survey data for the present study were collected from high-school students in four cities (i.e., Milan, Naples, Padova, Venice) in Italy that participated in the ‘Art and Science across Italy’ STEAM intervention implemented from September 2016 until April 2018
In response to calls for more research on assessing the impact of STEAM learning environments on creativity and its association with science learning outcomes (Cremin & Chappell, 2019; Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019), the present study was designed with three aims: (1) to monitor changes in students’ creativity and science motivation before and after their participation in a STEAM intervention; (2) to ascertain whether gender differences do exist with respect to creativity and science motivation; and (3) to untangle the interrelationship between creativity and science motivation by testing a pathway model according to which self-efficacy was hypothesised to mediate the relationship of two distinct cognitive processes associated with creativity with science career motivation (Conradty & Bogner, 2020; Conradty et al, 2020)
Summary
Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on the added benefits of arts-based approaches in inquiry science teaching and learning (Buck et al, 2019; Chappell et al, 2019; Conradty & Bogner, 2019). Theoretical and empirical progress has been made from the creative education literature in identifying key pedagogical features that characterise artsbased approaches to science teaching and learning (Chappell et al, 2019; Hetherington et al, 2020). Taken together, this body of research has recently been bundled under the umbrella term of STEAM education. Integrating the arts into science teaching is argued to unlock students’ imagination and wonder, motivating them to apply creative thinking to STEM subjects and, as a result, helping them identify and enact evidence-based connections between STEM-centric skills and real-world phenomena and challenges (Liao, 2016; Marmon, 2019). Arts integration into STEM curricula is suggested to promote inclusive and gender equitable classrooms (de Vries, 2021), thereby helping reverse current trends marked by persistent gender disparities in STEM disciplines (Ertl et al, 2019; Legewie & DiPrete, 2014; Wajngurt & Sloan, 2019)
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