fashion design education

Students in vocational practical courses start with uneven skills, so an instructional model has to cope with that gap without losing sight of individual accountability. This quasi-experimental pretest–posttest study compared Team Assisted Individualization (TAI) with conventional instruction in a Fabric Embellishment Techniques course of a Diploma III Fashion Design program. Two intact parallel classes of 13 students each (N = 26) took part in the second semester of academic year 2024–2025, and a lottery decided which class received TAI. Practical performance was scored on a 0–100 scale before and after instruction. The TAI class rose from 72.38 to 88.85 and the conventional class from 70.77 to 81.31, mean gains of 16.46 and 10.54 points. The classes did not differ significantly at pretest (p = .231), although the TAI class started 1.62 points higher. At posttest the difference was 7.54 points, t(24) = 4.42, p < .001, and the difference in gains was 5.92 points, t(24) = 6.48, p < .001. Because each condition was delivered to a single intact class, these student-level tests cannot separate the teaching model from class-specific influences, and the results are best treated as preliminary evidence.