"Effectiveness of a Teacher's Guide for the 'Integrated Science' Curriculum for First Secondary Grade Based on Design Thinking Skills to Enhance Creative Problem-Solving Skills."

 
The research aimed to develop teacher's guide for the "Integrated Sciences for First Secondary Year" curriculum, which was implemented for the first time in the academic year 2024/2025. This curriculum lacked a guide to assist teachers in achieving the intended objectives, prompting the researcher to propose a teacher's guide based on design thinking skills. This approach- design thinking- align with the philosophy and the goals of "Integrated Sciences" curriculum for secondary school students, which primarily include:
- Enhancing the learner's ability to focus on understanding and analyzing environmental issues and challenges to foster sustainable environmental thinking.
- Preparing learners to maintain the planet's well-being and contribute to the continuity of life for future generations.
The researcher employed a descriptive-analytical methodology, and the guide was structured into three main parts:
Part 1: Introduction and philosophical framework of the guide:
This section provides an introduction and the philosophical framework of the guide, outlining its purpose and alignment with the curriculum's objectives.
Part 2: Explains the first domain of the curriculum: "Sustainability of Life in Ecosystems from an Integrated Scientific Perspective," encompassing its four units of the first semester.  This section includes interactive and collaborative teaching- learning activities designed to support design thinking skills. Each activity is detailed, including activity type, title, objectives, procedural detailed steps to be followed, ideas, questions, experiments, and scenarios- Comprehensive details of ideas, questions, and experiments that can be used to activate and manage each activity individually, while clarifying the role of both the teacher and the learner at each step-.  This part provides also detailed evaluation mechanisms, particularly modern evaluation techniques that focus on evaluating the learner's actual performance.
Part 3: Covers the second domain: "Energy and Natural Resources," encompassing its four units (second semester). This part provides guidance by a set of interactive activities supporting the steps of design thinking. Each activity is described by its type, title, objectives, procedural steps, and assessment methods. However, unlike Part 2, it does not provide detailed explanations of the activity steps, offering instead key reference points for teachers to design activities in detail, using the provided list of references and educational resources included in the guide.
After completing the preparation of the guide, the unit "Energy Receiver" was experimentally applied to first-year female high school students to evaluate its effectiveness in developing creative problem-solving skills. A test was designed by the researcher to measure these skills, and teaching was conducted using the teacher's guide on a sample of 45 female students forming the experimental group and another sample of 43 female students forming the control group. The research concluded that there were statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups in the post-test assessment of creative problem-solving skills, favoring the experimental group.
Based on the findings, the research offers several recommendations and suggestions to further enhance the teaching and learning process within the framework of the "Integrated Sciences" curriculum.