The relationship of design thinking process with 21st century learning skills amongst students of engineering programs in Malaysia polytechnics

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to identify the current level of 21st century learning skills and level of Design Thinking among the polytechnic students around Malaysia. Another purpose of this research is to identify the relationship of Design Thinking with 21st century learning skills. Total of 335 students of polytechnic around Malaysia are willing to participate in this research by answering the questionnaire made for this research, which the students have been selected with simple random sampling through online method such as official email and Facebook, since face to face approach is not possible to be done during pandemic. The data has been collected for further analysis such as using Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) software. The results show that majority of the polytechnic students are having high level of communication skills, high level of creative thinking, medium level of critical thinking, high level of collaboration skills, and high level of character development, in perspective of level of 21st century learning skills. Majority of polytechnic students also have high level of empathic, high level of defining problem, high level of ideation, high level of prototyping, and high level of product testing, in perspective of level of Design Thinking. Inferential analysis shows that there is no significant different of 21st century learning skills level and Design Thinking level among gender, courses, and year of study. In addition, there is a significant relationship of 21st century learning skills with Design Thinking, with strong correlation. Next, further discussion is done on implication of the study and recommendation of future research regarding Design Thinking in TVET institutions.