Best Practices of STEM Education that Affects the Development of Vocational Students’ Design Thinking Processes

Abstract

           This research aimed to study the best practices in implementing STEM education approach for developing vocational certificate students’ design thinking processes. The research participants were 24 male vocational certificate students, in a colleague situateded in Bangkok, under the Office of the Vocational Education Commission who studied in the First semester of 2023 academic year. Data were collected from teacher’s journals, and students’ exit tickets, inductive analysis methods. were employed for analyzing the data.

            The research showed that the best practices in implementing STEM education approach for developing vocational certificate students’ design thinking processes were as follows:  1) Using video clips and images to promote students’ understanding the work they need to do. 2) Asking probing questions to guide students’ to planning their working processes.3) Encouraging students to write the flowcharts to show the working processes, or writing the diagrams to show the details of the ideas in solving the problem. 4) Promoting students to design their work in 2D, 3D, or diagrams, to see the possibility of the idea. 5) Having students to create their real artefacts or build the prototype using clay. 6) Encouraging students to test the effectiveness of their completed artefacts and collaboratively evaluate the appropriateness of the artefacts follow the given criterias. and 7) Favoring students to revise their artefacts and retest the effectiveness of the artefacts with the target groups again to ensure the confidence of the users.