Assessment of Creativity in Arts and STEM Intergrated Pedagogy by Pre-service Elementary Teachers

Review

The addition of creativity and the arts into the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics STEM) pedagogy has been lacking opportunities for students to investigate the need and importance of creativity in the disciplines. This research paper explores the perceptions of pre-service elementary teacher who learned how to employ digital media production technologies into STEM curriculum with multimedia. The teachers’ created STEAM integrated multimedia lessons which were evaluated. The results of which were analyzed and compared under qualifications of three distinct certification grouping categories.

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Abstract

In education, mathematics and science are often taught in a manner that lacks opportunities for students to engage in creativity, and the arts are allotted less time with fewer resources. This study focused on integrating STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) lessons with artsthemed activities to create interdisciplinary STEAM education in order to simultaneously address these two contemporary challenges. Teams of pre-service elementary teachers used multimedia production technologies to develop original STEAM lessons. Participants (n = 124) completed a total of 2,436 peer-evaluation surveys designed to measure the extent to which the STEAM lessons met specific creativity-related objectives. Participants also answered open-ended questions regarding similarities and differences between their own STEAM lessons and those of the other teams. The results showed general overall similarities among the three participating groups of bilingual generalist (BG), regular generalist (RG), and undecided generalist (UG) pre-service elementary teachers in regard to their peer evaluation scores for achievement of creativity-related objectives in the STEAM lessons.In addition, a substantial portion of participants from each group recognized the two highest and two lowest scoring achievement categories in their discussions of similarities and differences, and this qualitative data assisted in confirmatory triangulation of the quantitative findings.

Tillman, D. A., An, S., & Boren, R. L. (2015). Assessment of creativity in arts and STEM intergrated pedagogy by pre-service elementary teachers. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 23(3), 301-327.

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