Exploring the developmental trajectory of students' creative thinking and intellectual interaction in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment

Creative thinking is increasingly regarded as a core competency essential for addressing complex challenges in the 21st century. Although previous studies have explored strategies for fostering creativity in educational settings, limited attention has been given to how creative thinking develops within computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments guided by the design thinking (DT) framework. This study aims to bridge this research gap by examining the effects of a DT-CSCL intervention on students’ creative thinking development and by mapping the progression of creative thinking across the different stages of the design thinking process. A mixed-methods research design was employed with 40 vocational college students participating in the study. Data sources included students’ creative design task outputs and collaborative discourse collected from WeChat-based learning groups. Creative thinking was assessed using a revised coding scheme that captured both divergent and convergent thinking dimensions. Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) was used to analyze discourse data, enabling a comparative analysis of creative thinking patterns among students with high and low design performance, as well as tracing its evolution across DT stages. The results revealed notable differences between high- and low-performing students: high-performing students demonstrated stronger integration between divergent and convergent thinking, particularly in the areas of elaboration, synthesis, and decision-making. Conversely, low-performing students showed initial potential in idea generation but struggled with elaboration and refinement. Moreover, creative thinking followed a dynamic trajectory across the DT-CSCL stages, shifting from predominantly divergent to more convergent forms as students progressed through the design cycle. These findings highlight the importance of stage-specific instructional scaffolds in DT-CSCL settings and suggest that tailoring pedagogical strategies to the cognitive demands of each design phase can more effectively support students’ creative thinking development. Copyright © 2025 Elsevier Ltd.