Impact of Team Climate on Co-Creativity in STEAM Education in Primary Education

Abstract

The need to introduce co-creative approaches in education is nowadays seen as a way to support STEAM education. However, in collaborative activities, the team climate in which learners work seems to have an impact on them. In this context, this study sought to prove that team climate has an impact on the co-creativity of primary school students. Specifically, after completing a co-creative challenge, we administered the CoCreat questionnaire to 109 children, investigating three factors: the team climate in which the children operate, their co-creativity and, the process by which they complete the challenge. The results of the questionnaire showed that when children felt confident and could express their feelings freely within their team (i.e. a good team climate), this increased their scores for the last two factors. On the contrary, when children indicated that they were in an atmosphere of low trust, without conflict management, for example (i.e. a bad team climate), their scores on these two factors were greatly reduced. These results show that it is not enough to use co-creativity tools to develop co-creativity; one must be able to use them in a positive climate.