Source: Journal of Technology and Teacher Education Volume 23, Number 3, July 2015
This study focused on integrating STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) lessons with arts-themed activities to create interdisciplinary STEAM education in order to simultaneously address these two contemporary challenges.
The participants were 124 pre-service elementary teachers, who used multimedia production technologies to develop original STEAM lessons. They 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.