Crafting Maker Education Through Lesson Study: A Collaborative Journey

As digital technologies transform education, competencies such as critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving have become central to educational reform. In China, the 2016 National Core Competencies Framework for Student Development positioned Maker Education (ME) as a vehicle for integrating STEM learning. However, ME’s implementation poses challenges for teachers, including the need for interdisciplinary integration, student-centered facilitation, technological adaptation, and new assessment approaches. To address these challenges, researchers have proposed Design Thinking (DT) as a structured, human-centered framework that guides students through empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. When embedded in ME, DT supports both student creativity and teacher pedagogical design. Yet, successful adoption requires a supportive professional development system. Lesson Study (LS) offers such a system through iterative cycles of planning, teaching, observing, and reflecting, enabling teachers to refine instruction collaboratively based on student evidence. This thesis investigates how integrating DT into ME through LS transforms teachers’ pedagogical practices and affects student learning outcomes. It adopts a two-phase research design—a 4-month pilot study and a 16-month longitudinal quasi-experiment—organized into four sub-studies: Teachers’ pedagogical design practices (Study 1) Teachers’ insights into student learning (Study 2) Teachers’ professional knowledge development (Study 3) The impact of teacher changes on students’ STEM mastery (Study 4) During the pilot phase, five Chinese STEM teachers engaged in four LS cycles, combining the Chinese LS model with a “case student” observation method. Through this process, teachers developed a Design Thinking-based Maker Pedagogy (DTMP), characterized by (a) integration of the six-step DT process into ME, (b) a systematic project design framework, and (c) differentiated scaffolding strategies for each DT stage. Teachers also constructed a three-dimensional observation framework (cognitive, affective, behavioral) that deepened their understanding of student learning diversity and shifted their beliefs from product-focused to process-oriented, elite to inclusive, and teacher-directed to student-led education. In the longitudinal phase, five trained teachers implemented DTMP across 12 maker projects, while a control group used traditional methods. Comparative analysis of student performance across four STEM dimensions—Knowledge Recall, Conceptual Application, System Operation, and Project Evaluation—revealed that DTMP students achieved significantly higher mastery and more consistent growth trajectories, confirming the model’s effectiveness. The study makes three key contributions: Methodological innovation – Adapting the Chinese LS model with case-student observation to create an evidence-driven approach for differentiated instruction. Theoretical integration – Linking Teacher Noticing and Productive Failure theories to conceptualize students’ mistakes as valuable learning opportunities. Model development and validation – Establishing and empirically confirming the DTMP framework as a culturally responsive pedagogy that merges Western creativity-oriented ME with China’s structured instructional traditions. These contributions collectively offer a localized pathway for advancing ME in China and propose practical strategies for teacher professional development and classroom implementation. Despite its achievements, the study acknowledges four limitations: limited school diversity, imbalanced STEM focus, small sample size, and extensive researcher support. Future research should therefore explore DTMP’s adaptability in varied contexts, analyze teacher learning trajectories with larger samples, conduct long-term impact studies on student outcomes, and investigate scalable implementation in typical school settings. Overall, this research demonstrates that integrating DT and LS within ME fosters teacher growth, transforms pedagogical beliefs, and significantly enhances students’ STEM learning, providing a sustainable model for competency-based education reform in China and beyond.