Effects of Integrating Design Thinking Into Creative Teaching on Creative Tendencies, Creative Teaching Self-Efficacy, and Design Thinking Skills Among Preservice Teachers

Author: Hsiu-Ling Chen (Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, Nation Taiwan University of Science Technology), Ting-Yao Chen (Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, Nation Taiwan University of Science Technology)

Vol.&No.：Vol. 69, No. 2
Date：June 2024
Pages：243-273
DOI：https://doi.org/10.6209/JORIES.202406_69(2).0008

Abstract：
Introduction
Creativity has recently become an increasingly prominent research topic in the field of education. Teachers play an indispensable role in enhancing students’ creative performance. Therefore, strategies for stimulating preservice teachers’ motivation for creative teaching and for encouraging teachers to integrate and apply creative teaching skills and methods into curricula have been extensively discussed in the field of teacher education. The literature indicates that teachers’ creative teaching self-efficacy is essential for the implementation of creative teaching; teachers with higher creative teaching self-efficacy engage more in creative teaching behaviors. Hence, methods for enhancing preservice teachers’ creative teaching self-efficacy warrant further exploration. The emergence of design thinking has introduced new educational frameworks and thinking patterns. Design thinking strongly emphasizes the adoption of human-centered approaches, which involve observing and empathizing with real-life situations to explore underlying issues, and the iterative modification of prototypes through testing to develop solutions that optimally meet user needs. In education, design thinking entails a teacher’s ability to solve problems innovatively through a series of lesson plan designs, executions, revisions, and innovations before actual teaching. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to investigate whether the integration of the design thinking steps— namely empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test— into creative teaching courses can promote preservice teachers’ creative tendencies, creative teaching self-efficacy, and design thinking skills.
Literature Review
Design thinking involves five key steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The first step (empathize) requires designers to identify user needs by learning about their thoughts and feelings through interviews and observations. The second step (define) entails breaking down and summarizing the information gathered in the first step to further establish user needs. The third step (ideate) encourages designers to brainstorm systematically and generate various ideas. The fourth step (prototype) involves filtering and concretizing ideas generated during the third step to propose test plans for user experience, interaction, and dialog. The final step (test) entails refining solutions by gathering user feedback through the test plans proposed during the fourth step. Recent studies integrating design thinking into education have reported a strong correlation between design thinking processes and creativity. This teaching approach empowers teachers with problem-solving abilities and confidence in creativity; thus, design thinking is an effective method for addressing teaching challenges.
The study’s variables are explained as follows: Creative tendencies refer to an individual’s personality traits exhibited during creative activities. Integrating creative thinking and problem-solving methods into curricula effectively enhances a student’s creative tendencies. Creative teaching involves incorporating creativity into teaching methods to stimulate and support students’ creative expression. Creative teaching self-efficacy refers to a teacher’s confidence in their ability to creatively teach and influence student learning outcomes. Teachers with higher creative teaching self-efficacy are more confident in implementing creative teaching practices. Design thinking skills refer to the ability to iteratively generate an extensive array of ideas and then narrow them to optimal options during product development. Such skills involve the continual experimentation, refinement, and resolution of existing problems or recommendation of innovative ideas on existing objects.
This study integrated design thinking into creative teaching in order to encourage preservice teachers to identify topics for improvement and generate creative teaching plans through practical application. It further examined whether this integration can enhance teachers’ capabilities such as creative tendencies, creative teaching self-efficacy, and design thinking skills.
Methods
This study included 28 preservice teachers (14 men, 14 women) with an average (standard deviation) age of 20 (4.80) years. They volunteered to participate in the study and were divided into seven groups of four individuals each. Employing a single-group pre-/post-test design supplemented with qualitative data analysis, we conducted pre- and post-tests at the beginning and end of the semester, respectively. We assessed the participants’ creative tendencies, creative teaching self-efficacy, and design thinking skills by using Lin and Wang’s (1994) Williams Creative Tendency Scale (a revised version of F.E. Williams’ Creativity Assessment Packet), the Creative Teaching Self-Efficacy Scale compiled by Lin and Qiu (2008), and the Design Thinking Ability Scale developed by Xie (2012), respectively. Additionally, after the course concluded, two participants from each group were selected for a 40-min qualitative interview aimed at understanding their learning experiences and attitudes toward the integration of design thinking into creative teaching courses.
Results
This study analyzed all student metrics by using dependent-sample t-tests. The participants’ overall creative tendencies significantly differed between the pre- and post-test phases (t = 2.96, p < 0.01), indicating that integrating design thinking into creative teaching courses can enhance students’ overall creative tendencies. The participants’ creative teaching self-efficacy also differed significantly between the pre- and post-test phases (t = 5.84, p < 0.01), implying that integrating design thinking into creative teaching courses enhances preservice teachers’ overall creative teaching self-efficacy. Similarly, overall design thinking skills differed significantly between the pre- and post-test phases (t = 5.86, p < 0.01), signifying that integrating design thinking into creative teaching courses can enhance students’ design thinking skills.
Discussion and Suggestions
The results of this study imply that integrating design thinking into creative teaching courses can enhance preservice teachers’ creative tendencies, creative teaching self-efficacy, and design thinking skills. However, we also noted that during the teaching process, having students repeatedly brainstorm on the same topic led to difficulties in generating new ideas subsequently. Therefore, future research could provide students with flexible adjustments during the ideation stage, offering them different topics to practice various creative ideation strategies. Additionally, despite its positive results, this study did not explore the differences in variables between creative teaching courses incorporating design thinking and standard creative teaching courses. Accordingly, future research could include control groups to address this limitation.
 

Keywords：design thinking, creative tendency, creative teaching self-efficacy, design thinking ability

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