• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.825-833
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• 2017

The Korean Ministry of Education has emphasized human resource development with creative and convergent ability for future science and technology development. Korean STEAM Education aims to enhance students' interest and their understanding of science and technology as well as to develop students' creative problem-solving skills. Through STEAM R&E project, students experience self-directed research in order to solve the problem in the context of everyday life. In this study, we aim to find out whether the creative leader competency of high school students changed after they experienced the STEAM R&E project. The creative leader competency consisted of three domains: cognitive, affective, and societal domain. We measured the creative leader competency using the questionnaire scales. The questionnaire was administered to 612 high school students who participated in the 2016 STEAM R&E project. Pre- and post- test scores were collected, and we analyzed it. We compared the mean difference between pre- and post- test scores as well as the mean differences among science high school, gifted school, science core school, and general high school. From the result, we found that all student' creative leader competency improved after participating in the STEAM R&E project in all three domains. The result also showed that students' test scores of science high school and gifted school showed no significant mean differences, while student's scores of both science core school and general high school improved significantly. From the results, we concluded that STEAM R&E activities could be an effective tool in cultivating creative leader competency, especially for general high school students and science core school students. We also suggested that further researches are needed to find how we could enhance students' creative leader competency.