Frontiers in Psychology：职业设计教育中生成式 AI 支持学习感知与创意设计表现的课内相关研究

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Educational Psychology

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used in design courses, but evidence remains limited on how students' appraisal of such support co-varies with domain cognition, creative confidence, engagement, and independently assessed creative work. This within-course correlational study examined within-course change and theory-specified contemporaneous associations in a 72-hour Furniture Appreciation and Selection course involving 150 vocational design students in China. Sustainable design cognition and creative self-efficacy were measured before and after the course; perceived GenAI-supported learning and learning engagement were measured after it; and final creative design performance was rated independently by three experts. Paired-samples t tests described within-course change. Item-level CFA preceded the score-level association analyses, while standardized composite-score ordinary least squares models and 10,000-resample percentile bootstrap confidence intervals summarized theory-specified post-course associations and coefficient products. Sustainable design cognition increased from 3.326 to 3.792, t(149) = 10.362, p < 0.001, dz = 0.846, and creative self-efficacy increased from 3.509 to 3.877, t(149) = 7.424, p < 0.001, dz = 0.606; these values indicate change during the course as a whole rather than a GenAI-specific intervention effect. Among the direct post-course associations, learning engagement showed the largest coefficient with expert-rated creative design performance (β = 0.515, p < 0.001; f² = 0.361). The theory-specified coefficient products were 0.076 for SDC-CSE-LE, 0.204 for CSE-LE-CP, and 0.0080 for AISL-SDC-CSE-LE-CP. The last interval narrowly excluded zero [0.0002, 0.0234], but the product was statistically detectable and negligible in magnitude. Because the study followed one cohort without a comparison condition and most model variables were measured at the same post-course occasion, the findings support within-course change and contemporaneous association, not causal or temporally ordered effects.

Keywords

creative design performance, Creative self-efficacy, Creativity performance, Generative artificial intelligence, Learning engagement, vocational design education

Received

08 August 2026

Accepted

01 September 2026

Copyright

© 2026 Xiaoping, Chenhui, Shuangyan, Jiawei and Ding. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Fu Shuangyan

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