Peer Teaching as a Strategy to Promote 21st Century Skills in Apparel Technology Courses

Abstract

In this study, the researchers explored peer teaching to promote 21st Century skill development among undergraduate college students in apparel design and product development concentrations. Overall, the P21 framework provided a theory-based way to systematically analyze the pedagogical teaching strategy's learning outcomes, particularly related to assessing the effectiveness of advancing 21st-century skills. And, peer teaching, as developed in this study, was able to engender student’s professional development skills. Specifically, the topics ranged from using the clone stamp, warping text, clipping masks, and image trace, among others. The peer teaching strategy was effective in soliciting skills from all three first- order categories of the P21 framework from the data analysis. First-order skills promote an understanding of academic content at much higher levels by weaving 21st century interdisciplinary themes into key subjects. At the most granular level, the peer teaching strategy addressed 13 of 20 third-order skills in the P21 framework. This study's findings provide strong evidence of using peer teaching in future courses where the goal is to promote 21st-century skill development in future professionals.