XVIII. MİMARLIKTA SAYISAL TASARIM ULUSAL SEMPOZYUMU
Comparison of the Effectiveness of Constructivist and Direct Instruction Approaches in Design Studio Education
Yayıncı:
Balıkesir Üniversitesi Yayınları
In design project courses, students are expected to learn to think and behave like a designer and find solutions to design problems using elements such as idea, scale, material, application, and form. In these courses, constructivist approaches that aim to help students build knowledge based on their own experiences and implicit feedback from mentors are preferred instead of direct instruction because it restricts creativity. However, especially at the beginner level, students may misinterpret implicit feedback, and misunderstandings may spread among them. This may restrict students from understanding how they solved the problem and prevent creating permanent knowledge, even if they get a passing grade in the project course. This research examines how beginnerlevel architecture students' success levels (1-4 semesters) are affected by the direct instruction approach in which information is conveyed explicitly in detail and clearly in architectural project courses. A posttest with an experiment-control group model has been chosen. 27 students were divided into experimental (n = 14) and control (n = 13) groups. The study focused on basic education on the human scale in architecture. The same training material, which consisted only of basic information and did not include information about design quality, was delivered to both groups using two different methods. The direct instruction method was applied to the experimental group, which consisted of a short presentation, followed by a short reminder exam and repetition of the presentation. A constructivist approach was applied to the control group. It consisted of students studying information sheets printed on A4 papers, which were developed to model the information search process on a small scale. After 40 minutes of training, students submitted sketches and written reports due to 90 minutes of individual design work. The findings showed that students in the experimental group who received direct instruction were more likely to use the knowledge they acquired in design suggestions compared to the control group (experimental: 13/14; control: 7/13). The results are statistically significant (p=.033), and the effect size is medium-strong (Fc =.445, p=.021). There was no significant difference between the quality scores of the designs (since no training was given to affect this variable). This study emphasizes that educational models based on the constructivist approach should be reviewed by showing that the direct teaching method in the architectural design studio can be more effective than the approach based on the information search process. Additionally, it shows that direct instruction can be an effective method in architectural education, contrary to the common belief in the literature that is not based on experimental data.
