This article provides a look at both how design-thinking behaviors may be taught and encouraged in students and potentially provides a look into the Matthew Effect in education/achievement gap. It does this by providing students with choice-based assessments (CBA) which are meant to test how students address challenges through learning without being given guidance. Students must know how to deal with said challenge but be able and willing to use higher-thinking strategies without prompting. In order for this to occur, the study instilled design-thinking strategies meant for students to be able to think critically about problems and solve them on their own.

Educating and Measuring Choice: Design Thinking- Summary

In a 2020 study by Cutumisu et al., results demonstrated that students' design-thinking choices were more important for their poster design performance than their prior academic achievement in Mathematics, Science, and English Language Arts. Specifically, critical feedback seeking was positively associated with performance through revising, regardless of prior academic achievement. Prior academic achievement only indirectly predicted performance, with critical feedback seeking fully explaining the link between prior achievement and revision. A possible interpretation of these findings is that high-achieving students attained their academic levels by spontaneously employing these design-thinking strategies during their prior studies.

Results: Design-Thinking Choices and Poster Design Performance

-  Seeking constructive criticism and revising one's work are two examples of design thinking behaviors which are studied in this paper. 
-  Design thinking can ideally help students solve problems in unstructured learning domains outside their classroom, when guidance may be absent and they need to adapt to tackling the challenges of an ever-changing world surrounding them. 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Cutumisu, Maria, Schwartz, Daniel L, & Lou, Nigel Mantou. (2020). The relation between academic achievement and the spontaneous use of design-thinking strategies. Computers and education, 149, 103806. Article, OXFORD: Elsevier BV.

The relation between academic achievement and the spontaneous use of design-thinking strategies

Purpose
-  This study aims to explore the relations among prior academic achievement, spontaneous use of the two design-thinking strategies of seeking critique and revising, and performance in a brief on-line activity. 

Hypothesis
-  The researchers hypothesized that prior academic achievement will positively correlate with the choice to seek critical feedback and revise, and that the spontaneous use of these strategies will lead to better performance in the activity. 

Research Question
-  Are high-achieving students more likely to choose to seek revision (and constructive criticism) than low achieving students? More specifically, will high-achieving students seek constructive criticism at a higher rate and does the criticism drive them to revise more? 

Purpose & Hypothesis & Research Question

-  6th grade students play a game in which they create a posterlet, a computer-based assessment game that collected students' learning analytics while they were designing digital posters. This was used to determine whether students choose specific design-thinking strategies. 

-  After designing, students required to choose between receiving either confirmatory or critical feedback from a focus group of 3 virtual animal characters, asking each character for either critical “I don’t like" or confirmatory “ I like” feedback. 

-  For each poster, after receiving feedback, students decide whether to submit their poster as it is or revise it, which they can do only once per game round.  

-  The game also tracks poster quality. 

-  Design-thinking choices, performance outcomes, and prior academic achievements were all measured. 


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