SALT: SCIENTISTS AND ARTISTS LEARNING TOGETHER

The W.M. Keck Foundation-funded project, SALT: Scientists and Artists Learning Together, highlights the creative process across disciplines to bridge gaps, create conversation, and build innovative cross-talk. We present here data on the efficacy of SALT undergraduate research and curriculum design, with the intention of discovering connections in creativity and process skills between the arts and the sciences. Outcomes of integration of art into science teaching have been measured in the K-12 realm, but this approach is underutilized and understudied in higher education. With Great Salt Lake as a thematic umbrella, mixed interdisciplinary groups of students and faculty in SALT summer undergraduate research did field and lab work, designed performances, created visual art products, and engaged in creative skills employing inquiry. Courses created included a first-year learning community (“Expressing Evolution: Organisms, Change, and Representation”) of co-enrolled courses, a new general education course (“the Art and Science of Creativity”), and a majors’ elective (“the Chemistry of Ceramics”). We used a mutil-level evaluation scheme to determine the effectiveness of both research experiences and course design. Year one results gave us information not only about the level of success of our interdisciplinary approach, but also about where to dive deeper in year two. The utilization of a variety of assessment instruments in year one will inform the development of a new evaluation tool that can be broadly disseminated to measure the efficacy of art-science programming at the undergraduate level.