Fostering English-major students’ team creativity and collaboration through design thinking

Purpose Design thinking, as a creative and innovative methodology, has been proposed as a process for non-designers to address complex problems. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using design thinking to foster English-major students’ team creativity and collaboration. Design/methodology/approach This study employed a quasi-experimental design and was conducted online via Google Classroom. A purposive sample of 31 English-major students from a workplace action research class was used as participants of the study. Design thinking was introduced and employed to foster students’ team creativity and collaboration in the development of group research proposals. The four instruments used to collect the data included: team creativity questionnaire, team collaboration questionnaire, product satisfaction questionnaire and product quality questionnaire. Findings The results of the study revealed that mean scores of the four outcome variables: team creativity (4.31), team collaboration (4.20), product satisfaction (4.33) and product quality (3.87), were all at a “high” level, supporting that the approach promoted team creativity and team collaboration. Additionally, the correlations between team creativity and product satisfaction (0.49) and team collaboration and product quality (0.33) were both at a “moderate-substantial” level, potentially indicating their roles in ensuring rigorous output. Originality/value This research is significant because it provides new insights into the use of design thinking to foster students’ team creativity and collaboration in an action research course.