DESIGN-BASED THINKING AMONG SECONDARY STUDENT-TEACHERS: INPUT FOR A CONTEXTUALIZED TEACHING PLAN

Education

Design Thinking (DT) has been increasingly integrated into higher education disciplines as a practical pedagogical approach to developing students' problem-solving skills for real-world challenges. With that, the study explored the design-based thinking among secondary student-teachers at the College of Education of Bataan Peninsula State University-Balanga Campus as input for developing a contextualized teaching plan. It specifically analyzed the profile of the student-teachers in terms of age and area of specialization; their design-based thinking in terms of understanding (empathizing and defining), exploring (ideating and prototyping), and materializing (testing and implementing); the significant difference in the design-based thinking of student-teachers when grouped according to their profile; and the development of a contextualized teaching plan based on the findings. Using the descriptive-developmental design of quantitative research, the data were gathered from 199 student-teachers (60 English majors, 71 Filipino majors, and 68 Social Studies majors) enrolled during the First Semester of the Academic Year 2022-2023. A researcher-made survey questionnaire was used as the data gathering tool, wherein the results were analyzed using descriptive (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (t-test and ANOVA). The results indicated that there is a higher representation of female student-teachers, a notable interest in Filipino and English specializations, and a significant interest in teaching Social Studies subjects; the student-teachers exhibited highly manifested design-based thinking skills across all domains, reflecting their proficiency in empathetic research, creative idea generation, and effective solution implementation to address learners' needs; there is no significant difference in design-based thinking among student-teachers when grouped by sex, while a significant difference was observed in their area of specialization, highlighting the importance of targeted interventions and training to enhance these skills; and a contextualized teaching plan employing design-based thinking was developed, empowering student-teachers to create transformative learning experiences for their students.

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