Design Thinking im experimentellen Chemieunterricht

In today's globally networked world, information from the most diverse disciplines is available in almost unlimited abundance and varying quality. In order to prepare pupils for the challenges of the 21st century, this work developed a teaching concept to promote the necessary skills of creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration, 4 Cs (e.g. Fadel, Bialik & Trilling, 2017), – with a focus on creativity.
In doing so, an agile teaching concept - design thinking - was used and adapted to chemistry lessons. Design thinking is particularly suitable for complex tasks for which an innovative product is to be designed. Especially for the chemical industry, the development of new, environmentally friendly compounds and the use of sustainable raw materials as well as the resulting products is a central challenge.
The design thinking approach was developed at Stanford University under Winograd and Leifer to support companies in developing solution ideas. This later gave rise to the d.school, where students learn the process of design thinking (d.school, n.d.). A multidisciplinary team follows a systematic process. The process is not linear, but iterative, so that changes can be integrated again and again and mistakes can be learned from.
Design thinking has so far been used almost exclusively in project courses and social science or language subjects.
To ensure that as many boys and girls as possible receive support in the 4Cs, Design Thinking should be extended to all subjects - including chemistry. This way, the interests of all boys and girls can be addressed to increase motivation. If Design Thinking is integrated into the curricula, the participants will probably become more aware of the importance of this innovative approach.
Other special features of this concept are the integration of an assessment phase and a presentation phase. With the evaluation phase, the aspects of design thinking „economic viability, feasibility and user needs“ are fully presented. The presentation phase serves to promote communication competence. The problems were formulated with the help of topics from the field of sustainability in such a way that they are as complex as possible.
In order to test an approach for the subject of chemistry, promising framework conditions were first derived from other research. Three teaching modules were carried out in three consecutive years in two parallel courses in 11th, 12th and 13th grade, each with 10 teaching hours.
With the help of the analysis of the pupils' learning diaries, it could be shown in a first step that the integration of Design Thinking is successful. In the second step - according to the Design-Based Research approach - changes were made and tested in class. The difficulties that the boys and girls had with individual phases of Design Thinking could be improved by using methods to promote the skills required for these phases. Thus, both the creativity and the evaluation skills of the students increased. At the same time, the suitability of the derived framework conditions could be demonstrated.
As a result of such an open-ended, creative concept, it was assumed that the intervention would have an influence on the usual assumptions about the characteristics and contents of the subject chemistry (image) and that the boys' and girls' self-efficacy expectations would increase. This could be largely confirmed with the help of the evaluation of already established questionnaires through pre-post surveys with Likert scales. At the same time, it could be shown that especially the low-performing pupils of the participating courses benefit from this concept.