Enhancing students’ art attitudes and analytical thinking skills through a design thinking-based metaverse approach

Art appreciation is a form of input activity through which learners perceive and interpret the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of artworks, thereby establishing the foundation for their subsequent artistic creation. In the current art appreciation classroom, students generally face difficulties in acquiring personalised aesthetic experiences and an inability to deeply comprehend and analyse artworks. To this end, this study proposed a design thinking-based metaverse approach for art appreciation (Meta-DTAA), which not only provides students with an immersive shared interactive space and aesthetic resources, but also guides the art appreciation process through the design thinking framework. A quasi-experimental methodology was used in this work to validate its effectiveness. A total of 66 Chinese primary school students were randomly assigned to an experimental group (EG) and a control group (CG). The EG consisted of 30 students utilising the Meta-DTAA approach, while the CG comprised 36 students followed the design thinking-based approach for art appreciation in the traditional classroom setting. The findings showed that, after controlling for the pretest results, the EG in the Meta-DTAA intervention demonstrated significantly higher posttest scores than the CG in art attitudes, learning performance, and analytical thinking skills—particularly in organisation, attribution, and creativity. In summary, the study confirms the effectiveness of the Meta-DTAA. It also offers a methodological direction for the design of art appreciation activities in the metaverse, and a design reference for the application of the metaverse in primary school art appreciation teaching practice.