STEAM teaching professional development works: effects on students’ creativity and motivation

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Creativity
• Science-arts collaboration
• Motivation: self-efficacy
• STEM education
• STEAM (enriched with arts), inquiry-based science education
• Science classroom