An Essential Soft-Skill Required in Higher Education for Interior Design Students

The current trend of teaching and learning pedagogies at higher education, especially in architecture and interior design program focusing on developing analytical-thinking skill which is an essential soft skill for their students. These skills allow students to think critically, apply their reasoning-power to identify the correct design solution. But unfortunately, the learning attributes of group of students of Interior Design program were towards the basic cognitive-level of memorizing. They were passive learners and could hardly respond to questions which require higher cognitive level of analyzing. To overcome this situation, a classroom participatory action-research was conducted. In this action-research, 27 students participated of 300 level of Interior Design Program at University of Bahrain. The research was conducted through three cycles and continued for three months. In the pre-cycle stage, the research highlighted on the exiting teaching-learning conditions and the need to introspect new teaching strategies. In the next two cycles the learning theory of ‘learning-by-doing’ of constructivism-theory was implemented. All the primary data of this action-research were collected through results of class tests, focus group interview and questionnaire survey, whereas, the secondary data were collected from literature reviews. The main objectives of this action-research were to find out different ways to develop student’s analytical thinking skills and how to transform the students from passive learner to active learners. Therefore, conducting the classroom participatory action research proved that introducing activity-based learning, where activities were specially designed to induce students’ analytical thinking skills could transform students from passive to active learner and could successfully change their approaches towards learning. At the same time this teaching-learning strategies impacted deeply on developing student’s analytical-thinking-skills.