Sharpening Critical Thinking in Problem Identification in Design and Technology Education

The current study aimed to identify and clarify students’ critical thinking processes when understanding the design problem towards formulating design specifications within the problem identification stage when engaging in a design project at upper secondary level. Using design journals done by students in a Singapore secondary school, the study broke down students’ critical thinking processes based on various elements of reasoning to assess the quality of reasoning. From this study, a set of general guidelines can be proposed for students to achieve good reasoning standards in order to understand the problem and to determine appropriate design specifications. To achieve good reasoning standards when breaking down the design problem, research in three basic related areas such as environment, users and products are necessary to form important background knowledge.