Effect Of Design Thinking Approach On Secondary School Students’ Academic Performance In Essay Writing

Abstract

Background: Essay writing is a recognised weakness in Nigerian secondary education, yet classroom research has tested general activity-based methods rather than design thinking, whose application to writing instruction remains largely untested.
Objective: This study examined the effect of the design thinking approach on senior secondary school students’ academic performance in essay writing.
Method: A quantitative, quasi-experimental pretest-posttest non-equivalent control group design was adopted. From a population of 6,599 Senior Secondary School II students in Kogi State public secondary schools, 130 students (63 males and 67 females) were selected through multistage sampling from intact classes and assigned to a design thinking group (n = 66) and a discussion group (n = 64). An Essay Writing Performance Test (EWPT) was developed and used as the research instrument. Research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation, while hypotheses were tested using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) at the .05 level of significance, with pretest scores as the covariate.
Results: The design thinking group gained 30.26 points between pretest and posttest, compared with 8.11 points for the discussion group, resulting in a difference in mean gain of 22.15 points. The difference between the groups remained statistically significant after adjustment for pretest scores. Gender produced no statistically significant difference in academic performance within the design thinking group.
Conclusion: The study recommends that English language teachers adopt the design thinking approach to teaching essay writing. However, the findings are limited to Senior Secondary II students in one state and a four-week intervention; therefore, further research is needed to establish the generalisability of the findings.