DESIGN THINKING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A SCOPING REVIEW

Design Thinking is trendy in engineering and management educational settings. Some researchers link Design Thinking to the 21st century skills which are highly demanded by industry. In this paper we set the following research questions: 1) What are the characteristics and dimensions of Design Thinking? 2) What skills have been assessed on undergraduate or graduate students as a result of a Design Thinking intervention? 3) What are the ways to develop Design Thinking in education? There is no recent literature review about Design Thinking in engineering and management Higher Education. The purpose of this work is to bring a state-of-the-art of this topic, answering the proposed research questions. A scoping review was carried out building on the literature from the last 10 years as indexed in the 'Web of Science' database, using Arksey & O'Malley's five-stage framework [1]. The results show that: (1) There is no agreement for a clear definition of Design Thinking; nevertheless, there are two main ways of depicting it; (2) Only 20 studies out of 79 assess the impact on students as a result of an intervention. It was found around 20 skills, 7 learning outcomes and 5 attitudes, which were assessed. (3) Overall, some authors present ways to develop Design Thinking such as analogies, reflection, physical models, storytelling, among others. Though Design Thinking is presenting as a promising agenda for curriculum design attaining new goals for education, the results stress the need for more empirical robust arguments and evidencebased assessment because most of the research is still based on anecdotal testimonies; otherwise it could become just another fad. The paper provides avenues for future research.