The analysis of the impact of an art subject-linked invention education program on elementary school students' perception of the art subject
Authors:   Korean Association For Learner-Centered Curriculum And Instruction, Son YoungEun , Jeong DongHun 
Published: April 2024

Objectives Although the Korean Intellectual Property Office and the Korea Invention Promotion Association have so far promoted invention education focused on after-school education, with the announcement of the ‘2030 Vision of fostering intellectual property competency’, the organizations are actively promoting the implementation of invention education within regular class hours. To refine this direction of invention education, an invention education program linked to three regular curriculum subjects was developed in 2022. This study intended to analyze how the application of an art-related invention education program to schools affects elementary school students' perception of art subjects. In other words, this study intended to examine the cognitive characteristics of elementary school students regarding the art subjects before and after applying the art subject-linked invention education program. Also, this study sought to investigate whether there were differences in elementary school students' cognitive characteristics regarding art subjects before and after participating in the art curriculum-related invention education program.
Methods For this purpose, an invention education program linked to the art class was implemented with 189 participating students in three schools during regular class hours. Then the students' perception of the art class before and after the program was investigated using a survey developed and reconstructed based on the semantic discrimination method. Additionally, a t-test was conducted at the .05 significance level to investigate whether there was a difference in elementary school students' cognitive characteristics regarding art classes before and after participating in the art class-related invention program.
Results Both before and after participating in the art classes, there were no extreme values on either end regarding the perception of art subjects, with data ranging from 2 to 4 (on a scale of 1 to 7) on a questionnaire (consisting of pairs of adjectives with opposite meanings describing art subjects). Also, the change in perception of art subjects before and after participating in the program was not statistically significant.
Conclusions In conclusion, since there are no extreme values both before and after applying the program, it can be inferred that students do not have a set perception of art classes or invention-related art subjects. Additionally, the fact that the change in perception before and after program participation was not statistically significant may stem from the fact that only one topic out of four topics after development was applied on a pilot basis for each school for the duration of four sessions. Thus, it could be inferred that the time frame was too limited for meaningful changes in perceptions of the subject to occur. Also, it may be possible that there were limitations in applying invention education that accurately reflects the developer’s intent due to the absence of teacher training. In the future, through follow-up research that will be further supplemented these limitations, it is necessary to investigate more closely how students perceive the subjects after participating in invention education.