Live Musical Theatre Enhances Ocean Literacy Gains
To increase climate and ocean awareness in our local elementary schools (grades K-5), we developed an informal musical theatre marine science STEAM program called Something Very Fishy that combines a musical theatre performance with an imaginary field trip under the ocean manned by university students studying marine science education. After one year of live performances, we were forced to move to an online format during the COVID pandemic. This change in program modality afforded us a unique opportunity to directly measure the assessment gain differences between our live performance exhibit (STEAM) and one entirely presented in an online format without the musical theatre performance (STEM). Children attending the STEAM program manned by live performers and docents showed significantly higher gains in ocean literacy including the association of humans with ocean health, but career interest gains were similar for live versus online programs. Interest in STEM careers increased with grade and were larger for children in public Title I schools. Career interests also increased more for those STEM and arts careers present in our outreach program versus those not associated with our program.
From Childress, Prosser & Tallapragada 2023. Full STEAM Ahead: STEAM Approach Enhances Ocean Literacy and Career Interests. ICES Journal of Marine Science (In review)
Figure 2
Children were given a Something Very Fishy Student Workbook (A) and asked to complete two tasks prior to attending and immediately after attending our program. (B) Ocean Vision – draw what it looks like under the ocean. (C) I Sea Myself – circle three careers that you like the most. We used the same workbook and assessments for both years of our study.
Figure 3
Ocean Vision assessment results (means +/- 95% CI). Gains (post-pre differences) for three measures related to drawings of what it looks like under the ocean by exhibit modality and grade. (A) Construct – increasing values have increased frequency of humans and human artifacts in the drawing. (B) Centricity – increasing values have more elements from the SVF exhibit in the drawing. (C) Scenario – increasing values have positive or neutral scenarios in the drawing. Live (open bars) = live performance and exhibit in 2020. Online (gray bars) = online exhibit only in 2021.
