THE INFLUENCE OF STEAM TEACHING ACTIVITIES INTEGRATING LOCAL ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS ON UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ PRO-ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOR AND SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY

This study aims to explore the impact of STEAM teaching activities that incorporate local environmental awareness on university students’ pro-environmental behavior (PEB), and scientific creativity. The teaching activity design of this study was centered on “designing livable housing in Taiwan”, and a total of four projects were designed. This research included university students (N=66) who were divided into a control group (n=33) and an experimental group (n=33). The experimental group added videos on local environmental awareness such as “local disasters and local household interview news”. The students were required to fill out the “Scientific Creativity Questionnaire” and “PEB Scale” before and after the teaching activities. The results of the study indicate that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the post-test for the sub-dimensions of "Green Behavior," "Global Warming Awareness," "Environmental Social Interaction," "Informal Environmental Education," and "Environmental Attitude." This suggests that incorporating local environmental awareness materials into STEAM teaching activities is more effective in enhancing university students' PEB compared to standard STEAM teaching activities. Additionally, both groups showed improvements in overall scientific creativity after participating in the different activities, particularly in the areas of fluency and flexibility. However, ANCOVA analysis revealed no significant difference in scientific creativity between the two groups in the post-test. The results indicated that the integration of local environmental awareness materials was not the primary factor contributing to improvements in scientific creativity. This study recommends that higher education lectures integrate both environmental awareness and scientific content into curriculum design to strengthen students' overall competencies. Keywords: local environmental awareness, quantitative research, pro-environmental behavior (PEB), scientific creativity, STEAM