Design Thinking Training Boosts Math Teachers’ Instructional Design Skills

Mathematics teachers who went through a short, technology-enhanced Design Thinking training program emerged with measurably stronger design-oriented professional competencies, according to a new study published in Discover Education. The research, led by İsmail Satmaz, Zerrin Toker, and Derya Girgin of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Türkiye, offers one of the first empirical examinations of how Design Thinking training affects mathematics teachers’ instructional design skills—and, unusually, it also scrutinizes the statistical quality of the very criteria used to judge that training.

Contemporary mathematics teachers are increasingly expected to act as designers of student-centered, technology-supported, problem-oriented learning experiences rather than mere transmitters of mathematical content. Yet many professional development programs still provide limited empirical evidence on how teachers can be supported in reframing instructional problems, designing mathematical learning tasks, and evaluating their own design-oriented competencies. Studies indicate that conventional teacher education frequently fails to cultivate the competencies needed for managing complex problem scenarios, including adaptability, creativity, critical thinking, and collaborative design. Even though mathematics is naturally related to other disciplines, that relationship is rarely reflected in classroom practice, where subjects are mostly taught in isolation from one another.

Design Thinking offers a user-centered, empathy-focused, and innovative problem-solving process. In this study, problem-solving was conceptualized primarily as instructional and pedagogical problem-solving within mathematics teaching—not as the direct measurement of students’ mathematical problem-solving achievement. Design Thinking supports mathematics teachers in identifying instructional challenges, reframing student needs, designing technology-enhanced learning tasks, and developing prototypes such as activity plans, worksheets, digital visualizations, and classroom scenarios. Drawing on Kees Dorst’s account of design thinking as a means of deriving meaning through reframing, the researchers emphasize that a designer examines existing circumstances from various perspectives before addressing a problem, reinterpreting contextual, relational, and conceptual components to formulate alternative problem definitions. When teachers can reframe pedagogical problems this way, they develop a deeper analysis of classroom routines, student needs, and learning contexts.

The study’s theoretical backbone is Activity Theory, which treats learning not just as an individual mental process but as transformative social action arising from interactions between the subject (the teacher), tools (technological design tools and materials), rules (pedagogical norms and school culture), community (colleagues, students, and the school ecosystem), and division of labor. In the operationalization of the training, the mathematics teacher was the subject of the activity system, while the object was the redesign of a pedagogical or instructional problem encountered in mathematics teaching. Mediating tools included Design Thinking templates, empathy maps, digital collaboration tools, GeoGebra, Desmos, Canva, worksheets, and prototype materials. The community consisted of participating teachers, peers, instructors, and potential students; the rules referred to curriculum expectations and school-based constraints; and the division of labor was reflected in the roles of teachers as designers, peers as feedback providers, instructors as facilitators, and raters as evaluators. The expected outcome was a technology-enhanced mathematics learning prototype that responded to identified student needs.

The intervention itself was compact: four sessions of 90 minutes each, structured around mathematics teaching problems rather than general problem-solving tasks. In the first session, focused on empathy and problem definition, teachers identified student difficulties in mathematics topics such as fractions, proportional reasoning, geometry, graph interpretation, and algebraic thinking, using empathy maps, student scenarios, and classroom-based problem situations. The second session had teachers reframe these instructional problems from different perspectives and generate alternative solution ideas through brainstorming, SCAMPER, reverse thinking, shared digital boards, and quick prioritization tools. In the third session, teachers transformed selected ideas into low-cost, feedback-oriented prototypes, such as GeoGebra- or Desmos-supported activities, worksheets, visual materials, short mini-lesson scenarios, or student-centered mathematical tasks. The fourth session centered on presenting prototypes, receiving peer and instructor feedback, and revising designs based on criteria such as mathematical appropriateness, student-centeredness, feasibility, technology integration, and alignment with student needs. All sessions were conducted by the same researcher, with content, duration, and order determined in advance according to a detailed implementation plan to ensure fidelity.

Eighteen mathematics teachers participated, selected through criterion sampling: none had previously received formal training or in-service training on Design Thinking, design-based learning, or a similar pedagogical approach, and all volunteered. The study used a single-group pretest–posttest quasi-experimental design, which the authors themselves flag as a limitation: without a control group, observed changes cannot be attributed exclusively to the intervention, so the findings are interpreted as preliminary evidence of change rather than strong causal evidence. Teachers’ design thinking skills were measured with a previously validated multidimensional Design Thinking Skills Scale covering four dimensions—relationship, process, ethics, and individual—administered as a pretest before training and a posttest afterward.

The results showed a statistically significant increase in teachers’ total design thinking scores, which rose from 99.28 to 113.72, t(17) = 2.97, p = .01, with a moderate-to-large effect size of dz = 0.70. Posttest scores were higher than pretest scores on the total scale and all four subdimensions. The largest effect appeared in the process dimension, dz = 0.74, which the researchers attribute to the training’s explicit guidance through the sequential stages of empathy, problem definition, reframing, ideation, prototyping, testing, and feedback. As teachers repeatedly engaged with these stages while developing mathematics-related instructional prototypes, they may have gained a clearer understanding of how to organize and manage design-based teaching processes. Effects for the relationship, ethics, and individual dimensions were moderate, with dz values ranging from 0.51 to 0.63, suggesting the training also supported teachers’ perception of professional responsibility and professional identity development.

What sets the study apart methodologically is its second research strand: a psychometric audit of the 21-item evaluation rubric developed to judge the training process, using Many-Facet Rasch Measurement (MFRM). Traditional measurement models often overlook variables such as rater error, item difficulty, or scale functionality when evaluating teacher education practices. Rasch models allow the simultaneous, objective examination of learner proficiency, rater behaviors, item difficulty levels, and scale functionality within a single hierarchical model. The rubric’s content validity was first established through expert opinion following Lawshe’s method: seven academics specializing in educational sciences, mathematics teacher education, and teacher training rated each item as necessary, useful but not necessary, or unnecessary. Item-level content validity ratios ranged from 0.71 to 1.00, and dimension-level content validity index values ranged from 0.80 to 0.93—well above thresholds suggested in the literature, indicating high content validity and broad expert agreement on the relevance of the criteria.

For the MFRM analysis, teachers’ design products and process outputs were scored by independent raters on five-point scales, with the scoring matrix structured as teacher × criterion × rater. The model defined three facets: the 18 teachers whose performance was evaluated, the 21 performance criteria, and the independent scorers. The item-rater map revealed meaningful heterogeneity: raters J2, J5, J10, J12, and J13 had the highest measures (4.03 logits) and were the most lenient, whereas J9 had the lowest measure (−0.25 logits) and was the most severe, with rater measures spanning 4.28 logits. Criteria M10 and M11 were the most difficult (1.57 logits), followed by M7 (0.98 logits), while M8 was the easiest (−1.49 logits), with criterion difficulty covering 3.06 logits. Rater separation reliability stood at 0.86 with a separation index of 2.44, indicating the model distinguished roughly three to four levels of rater leniency—evidence of distinguishable rater severity levels rather than a conventional inter-rater agreement coefficient. Rater J17 showed the clearest misfit, with Infit and Outfit mean-square statistics of 2.19 and 2.17, while criterion M18 misfit most clearly with Infit and Outfit values of 2.37 and 2.26. The criterion separation reliability of 0.62, with a separation index of 1.28 and strata value of 2.05, indicated moderate differentiation corresponding to approximately two distinguishable difficulty levels—suggesting that diversifying or increasing the number of criteria could enhance the model’s capacity for finer-grained distinctions.

The authors are careful about what the findings do and do not show. The results do not provide direct evidence that students’ mathematical problem-solving achievement improved; rather, mathematics teachers reported stronger design thinking competencies after the training and produced design-oriented outputs during the process. The technology-enhanced nature of the training played a supportive role: digital tools such as GeoGebra and Desmos enabled teachers to consider dynamic representations of mathematical concepts, while Canva, shared digital boards, and short feedback forms supported rapid prototyping, visualization, collaboration, and iterative revision. Technology was not treated merely as an instructional add-on but as a mediating design tool that helped teachers transform pedagogical ideas into concrete learning prototypes. The researchers recommend future studies with larger and more diverse samples, control or comparison groups, longitudinal follow-up measures, and classroom-based evidence, along with more systematic rater training and calibration procedures. Linking teacher outputs to indicators such as TPACK could enable more direct monitoring of development. For now, the study stands as preliminary but promising evidence that Design Thinking, supported by technology and measured with rigor, can help mathematics teachers grow into the instructional designers their classrooms increasingly demand.

Subject of Research: Evaluating technology-enhanced design thinking training for mathematics teachers

Article Title: Evaluating technology-enhanced design thinking training for mathematics teachers

Article References: Satmaz, İ., Toker, Z., & Girgin, D. (2026). Evaluating technology-enhanced design thinking training for mathematics teachers. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 853. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02031-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02031-6

Keywords: Evaluating, technology-enhanced, design, thinking, training, mathematics, teachers, scientific research