Clean drinking water, our most important resource, needs comprehensive protection. Due to its ubiquitous availability, the awareness of the importance of clean drinking water has partially vanished. Therefore, sensitizing within this context and improving individual ecological behavior has become an important issue in science curricula. We developed a student-centered guided-learning module based on nine workstations, with the themes: occurrence rates, purification methods, cleaning guidelines, distribution patterns, use and consumption, pollution, problems, types of drinking water and virtual water. One hundred and seventy four ninth to eleventh graders participated in our outreach intervention. All tasks presented via workstations were completed before participants inspected a nearby reed sewage treatment plant and completed hands-on experiments. For empirical analyses, we collected the newly acquired knowledge in three dimensions: system-knowledge, action-related knowledge and effectiveness knowledge, which together are assumed to provide a sufficient basis for conservation behavior. System knowledge directly affects action-related and effectiveness knowledge and these two types of knowledge, in turn, affect directly the ecological behavior. At all three test schedules, the three dimensions of knowledge correlated with each other, especially in both follow-up tests. The relevance of these results for schools is discussed.

STEM subjects enriched with Arts (STEAM) are assumed to enhance science lessons and making them more attractive. A multidisciplinary STEAM module integrating inquiry-based learning was implemented to a sample of 160 students (11–12 years; 43.1% females). In a four-hour lesson, dealing with scientific phenomena surrounding bird flight, students learned at self-explanatory workstations that allowed space for creativity and a high level of autonomy. An arts facet was employed, using collaborative handicraft artwork. A workbook offered guidance, while the teacher’s role was of a passive tutor. A pre-/post-/retention-test design monitored knowledge, motivation, and two factors associated with creativity (Act and Flow) two weeks before, immediately after and six weeks later. The intervention produced long-term knowledge and built stable scores of intrinsic motivation, but self-reported aspects of creativity were not affected with a single STEAM intervention. Thus, it seems obvious that regular training in an adequate sociocultural setting is needed to develop creativity sustainably. Nevertheless, this study monitored the correlation of knowledge motivation and creativity in a science education setting for the first time. The findings indicate that fostering creativity, for example in STEAM environments, is a promising starting point for research into promoting motivation and creativity in educational settings.

Many current curricula, in going beyond traditional goals, increasingly foster creativity in science classrooms, declaring creativity a core skill of the 21st century. For enhancing creativity in science classrooms, the subject Arts is considered to offer a potential way from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) to STEAM (STEM with Arts)). The Horizont-2020 project Creations prepared more than 100 creativity-enhancing STEAM modules based on the 5E instructional model. STEM subjects were mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry or technology, and often interdisciplinary for different school and class levels between the ages of nine and nineteen. All modules provided a social environment fostering creativity where students imagine, explore, experiment, test, manipulate, and speculate. Exemplarily, five modules including physics, math, and biology, were selected, for monitoring motivation and creativity. The first was measured on the level of career-motivation and self-efficacy, the latter focused on two sub-constructs: active cognition such as idea processing (Act), and a mental state of creative immersion (Flow). Subjects were a sample of 995 students (9–18 years). In summary, no gender impact or age effect appeared in any of the monitored variables. Participation intervened with Self-Efficacy and Act, while Career Motivation or Flow did not. Act as a cognitive variable associated with creativity might be more sensitive to changes, whereas Flow as a parameter measuring a state of mind related to emotion appears more stable. Path analysis supported the role of creativity for Career-Motivation by promoting Self-Efficacy. Conclusions for appropriate educational settings to foster STEAM environments are discussed.

When monitoring the long history of empirical instruments for environmental attitude measurement, the Two Major Environmental Value model (2-MEV) with its two higher order factors: Preservation (PRE) and Utilization (UTL) has repeatedly and independently been confirmed. PRE assesses preferences towards conservation of nature and the environment, whilst UTL measures preferences towards utilization/exploitation of nature. The latter, however, does not yet include the positive aspects of benefitting from the (enjoyable) use of nature. Consequently, besides the established 2-MEV-battery, additional items from an “Appreciation of Nature” (APR) scale were applied to an Irish sample of 289 secondary school students (age: M = 14.3 years). Responses to the altogether 30-item battery were applied on an oblique rotation by using the Promax procedure: UTL and PRE appeared as orthogonally related factors, APR correlated to PRE with 0.283. Based on loading scores, the item number for each subscale was further reduced to make the analysis more manageable in educational outreach sites; on those sites, where completing questionnaires may well be quite unpopular, they are very much needed for planning and fine-tuning educational programs. Therefore, extending the 2-MEV scale with an added scale for Appreciation may help: (i) to judge participants’ feedback for adjusting/balancing program contents better; and (ii) to promote appreciation as a successful strategy for shifting individuals away from their individual exploitative preferences.