DEVELOPING INNOVATIVE THINKING THROUGH STEAM EDUCATION
Received: 2026-05-30
Published: 2026-06-06
Abstract
At a time when technological change is reshaping the labour market, school education needs to move beyond the function of merely transmitting knowledge and become a platform for developing ways of thinking. This article investigates the effectiveness of integrated teaching organized on the basis of the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) concept in developing innovative thinking skills among school students. The study was conducted as an eight-week pedagogical intervention involving 48 students in the experimental group and 46 students in the control group. Five cognitive indicators were compared using pre-test and post-test measurements. In the experimental group, innovative idea generation increased by 45 percentage points, teamwork by 33 percentage points, and critical analysis by 32 percentage points; the overall average increase was 35 percentage points. Changes in the control group were limited to 3–5 percentage points. Scratch, micro:bit, and robotics modules significantly increased students' independent decision-making activity from the fourth week onward. The study shows that STEAM education can produce directly measurable cognitive effects and provides an empirical basis for expanding interdisciplinary education in schools in Uzbekistan.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.