Science through Art: Motivating Gifted and Talented Students

Gifted and talented students have unique characteristics and needs. Arts Integration is an effective differentiation strategy that helps meeting these students’ needs. STEM subjects are easily and organically integrated with the Arts because scientific and artistic inquiry are very similar. This practical article describes an arts-integrated project that provided the gifted and talented participants with an increased level of challenge, an opportunity for self-expression and for building social skills, amplified motivation, and a chance to deepen and demonstrate their knowledge of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, social studies and English Language Arts. In this project, identified gifted students completed figural transformations (creation of a new image by adding lines or shading to a given squiggle or geometric figure) related to one of these subject areas and learned a set of creative skills identified by E. Paul Torrance. The final stage of the project included students analyzing and reflecting on the progress they had made over the course of the semester in content knowledge and creativity