Design thinking, as an advanced teaching model, is not only used in elementary schools, but is also practiced by teachers in secondary schools. However, it often happens that teachers do not even realize that they are practicing it. For the effective implementation of design thinking, it would help a lot if teachers taught the students to solve more complex problems with the intention that there is nothing wrong if the solution is wrong in the first attempt. Rather that we can arrive at the correct solution with repeated attempts.
In the theoretical part of the master's work, we emphasized design thinking, dominant definitions, historicity and the development model. We gave some examples of different types of design thinking and described the design thinking model developed at Stanford University (Hasso Plattner Institute). We also presented the education model that takes place in Slovenia and the individual program of secondary education (general education, vocational education, professional education, etc.). The target model in the field of education in secondary vocational technical schools was investigated. The main purpose of the master's thesis is to determine the prevalence of design thinking in secondary schools and how it is intertwined with the goal orientation of students and what influence certain phases have in the production of a product.
A quantitative approach of empirical research is used. The research was conducted in the school year of 2021/2022. Students from several different vocational and technical high schools participated in the research, approximately 120 students in total. We used a questionnaire on design thinking, designed by Dosi and his colleagues, and a questionnaire on students' goal orientation, which was adapted by prof. Stanislav Avsec. The design thinking questionnaire can be divided into 22 constructs, where each category covers the student's cognitive, conative, affective and meta-cognitive characteristics.
The average rating of design thinking among students of secondary vocational and technical education is mostly above the average value of the scale (3.5). The lowest average scores are found among the students of the mechanical technician program, especially when it comes to their awareness of the design process, which also applies to their peers in the professional direction, both mechanical and woodworking. The categories of creative confidence, desire for change and optimism for change and progress are rated higher, especially among students of vocational education, especially carpentry orientation.
Throughout the research, we discovered many differences in the ability to design practical products between groups of students. The difference appeared between the machine orientations, namely in the awareness of the design process. The following difference was observed in the development and use of practical intelligence during workshop activities between professional and machine orientation. The difference was also noticeable in the design process between the students' technical and professional carpentry orientation.
When determining the goal orientation of students in practical work, we found that competition among students is rated lower on average in all courses, while the other three goal orientations are rated higher. The students of the professional carpentry course rated themselves higher on average, especially compared to the students of the secondary technical course.
When determining the importance of a certain phase and evaluation of the product's implementation, they rated prototyping as the most important phase, followed by testing, while their peers rated testing and product improvements better. In general, the empathy phase is the worst accepted by students, followed by the definition of the problem.
The questionnaire on students' orientation towards learning goals can be divided into two parts. The first measures the general goal orientation (why and how the product is planned and manufactured), while in the second part we learned which part the students pay more attention to and how they would evaluate each phase in the production of a certain product.
We wanted to show possible connections between design thinking and students' goal orientation for the purpose of sharpening design thinking when teaching practical training content or technical practicum. We arrived at the results by applying descriptive statistics, correlation, variance analysis to the collected data.
With this research, we want to enable teachers who teach practical subjects in secondary schools to introduce students to the use of design thinking and to use or implement design thinking in lessons as much as possible. In the future, we would like design thinking to be implemented in other subjects in secondary schools and for more research to be done in this field in Slovenian schools, so that teachers would have more opportunities or better starting points for developing design thinking.
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