Three- and Four-Year-Olds Learn About Gears Through Arts Incorporation

• In Event: 30.081 - Poster Session 5
  In Poster Session: 30.081-4 - Science Learning and Teaching Posters II

Abstract

This paper explores art integration into the Next Generation Science Standards in a pre-school lesson about gears and focuses on the effects on memory and enjoyment. The design was pretest-posttest counterbalanced design with two random groups of children alternating the experimental and control condition. The results were not statistically significant at the alpha = 0.05 level between conditions in the amount of information retained. However, overall knowledge gains for both conditions were demonstrated. The study suggests that incorporating arts into the curriculum can be beneficial for children’s comprehension of some scientific concepts and can facilitate the construction of their schema of gears.
Keywords: NGSS, STEM, STEAM, lesson plan, gears, schema theory

Author

• Dessy S. Stoycheva, University of Northern Iowa