Online Design Thinking Problems for Enhancing Motivation of Gifted Students

Motivation is important for harnessing abilities and competencies, even if students are naturally or potentially gifted. This study used design thinking pedagogy as an innovative approach to motivate students holistically to learn and attend school. Design thinking is an approach to acquire and apply knowledge in a real situation that involves five stages: empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The study was a quantitative quasi-experimental study with a one-group design and pre and post-tests. The study evaluated intrinsic and four extrinsic motivation categories – integrated, identified, introjected, and external regulation – to evaluate gifted students’ motivation to do coursework, and used a motivation scale to gauge their willingness to attend school, and an attitude questionnaire to determine students’ satisfaction with and engagement in the design thinking class. The experimental group consisted of 77 randomly selected gifted students at the King Abdullah II School for Excellence. After engaging in the design thinking class, the gifted students’ scores on all motivation categories were higher in the post-test than they had been in the pre-test. However, gifted students’ motivation levels were not associated with their gender, grades, and SAT scores. Thus, the design thinking approach is a promising approach for educating gifted students; students found it satisfying and they exhibited high levels of engagement behavior. The study results recommend that a design thinking approach is worth pursuing to increase gifted students’ motivation. The researchers recommend considering both gifted and non-gifted students in future studies involving the design thinking approach.