Project-Based+Learning

= = Project-based assignments are essentially inquiry-based assignments that result in publicly presented projects. John Larmer and John R. Mergendoller, directors with the Buck Institute for Education, have articulated eight essential elements that make project-based learning personally meaningful to students and educationally purposeful. Those elements are highlighted below (PBL 8 Essential Checklist).

The 8 Essentials of PBL
Project-based learning strives to connect important knowledge, concepts, and skills related to adopted learning standards to real-world experiences that are significant to students' lives. This **//significant// //content//**, whenever possible, should be connected to an intrinsic **//need to know//** that provides **//driving questions//** that motivate students to pursue the learning objectives on their own. One of the best ways to establish a //need to know// is to begin with what students //want to know//, but this is often difficult to align with established learning objectives or to coordinate all of the diverse interests and talents of students. Thus, Larmer and Mergendoller recommend using an "entry event" to engage students in experience that gains its own authentic momentum. Guest speakers, current events, newspaper articles and editorials, documentaries, and field trips are just a few of the experiences that can serve as entry events. These types of experiences should lead to questions that motivate students to learn more about the topic, interpret their findings, and create a response, ideally in the form of social action. According to Larmer and Megendoller, these "provocative, open-ended, complex" questions, "linked to the core of what you want students to learn," should provide students with "a sense of purpose and challenge.

These questions should require students to draw upon **//21st century skills//**as they pursue //**real inquiry**// that leads to //**innovation**//. Real inquiry goes beyond what can be found by merely performing a Google search or reading a textbook. It involves combining a host of resources in a new way that results in new knowledge, new perspectives, and new solutions to problems. By providing **//feedback and opportunities for revision//**, teachers serve as mentors and guides in the process towards **//publicly presented products//** of learning. Teachers should consider using rubrics to provide meaningful formative assessment that assists students as they move through the process towards their final product. Rubrics can also help you design your PBL designs.

While not all IBL experiences result in a publicly presented product (sample K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12 presentation rubrics), the best project-based learning are embedded in the inquiry process. Within the constraints of a class and goals of a course, however, teachers often have to limit the stages and scope of the inquiry process by delimiting the range of choices associated with topics, questions, products, resources, and time. Nevertheless, providing students with as many opportunities for choice and to voice the importance of those choices and their findings is essential to making the project meaningful to students. On one end of the continuum, teachers can allow students to choose their own topics with varying driving questions, along with the products they create and the resources they will use, including how they structure their use of time. At the other end of the continuum, teachers may allow students to select a specific topic associated with one over-arching driving question or to choose the nature of their product related to the same topic and question for all. Within these two extremes, teachers can provide a limited selection of choices for any number of the essential components of PBL.

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Constructivism
[|Savery and Duffy (2001)] argue that PBL is "one of the best exemplars of a constructivist learning environment." They provide a framework that moves from a theory of knowledge through instructional design to the practice of teaching.

Three Propositions of Constructivism
They provide three essentials of constructivism, a philosophical theory about how humans come to understand or gain knowledge.

//**Understanding is in our interactions with the environment.**//


 * What humans come to understand is a function of the content, the context, the activity of the learner, and the goals of the learner. Thus, cognition is distributed; it is not merely contained within the individual.

//**Cognitive conflict or puzzlement is the stimulus for learning and determines the organization and nature of what is learned.**//


 * The goal of the learner--the problem to be solved, the puzzlement to be made sense of--drives learning.


 * //Knowledge evolves through social negotiation and through the evaluation of the viability of individual understandings.//**


 * Collaboration actually facilitates puzzlement as those we interact with challenge our views.
 * Collaboration is also essential to forming a consensus as a "viable interpretation of our experiential world."
 * Finally, the social environment helps us test the viability of our new understanding.

Eight Instructional Principles

 * Anchor all learning activities to a larger task or problem that provides importance and relevance.
 * Since the goals of the learner largely determine what will be learned, support the learner in developing ownership for the overall problem or task.
 * Define the territory and allow the learner to develop a meaningful problem with your guidance.
 * Define the problem in such a way that learners adopt it as their own.
 * You do not have to accept the learner's problem; you can negotiate with the learner to make sure that the problem is significant enough and allows for authentic challenges.
 * Design an authentic task that allows learners to engage in the same types of cognitive challenges that they would in the real domain.
 * Design the task and the learning environment to reflect the complexity of the environment they should be able to function in at the //end// of learning.
 * Give the learner ownership of the process used to develop the solution.
 * Design the learning environment to support and challenge the learner's thinking.
 * As consultant and coach, the teacher guides the learner towards becoming an effective thinker in a particular domain. The teacher should value the learner's thinking but //not// settle for thinking that does not reflect the cognitive demands the learner would face in the real domain.
 * Instead of asking questions that move the learner to the "right" answer, the teacher asks questions that touch on the Vygotsky's (1978) zone of proximal development--the zone between boredom and anxiety. By supporting or scaffolding learners as they enter unfamiliar territory, these questions move learners out of the comfort of what they already know.
 * Encourage testing ideas against alternative views and alternative contexts.
 * Provide opportunity for and support reflection on both the content learned and the learning process.
 * One important goal of the process is to help the learner acquire self-regulating behaviors. Therefore, learners should as much on how they learned as they should on what they learned.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Problem-Based Learning

 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Generating Learning Goals
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The students are assigned to small groups with facilitators (teacher, community members, more experienced students).
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">They are given the problem without any background: the problem should be real and raise the essential concepts and principles relevant to the field.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Each student reflects on the problem, starting with what he or she already knows.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The group generates a set of learning goals with each student taking responsibility for a share of those goals.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Students draw upon resources, including the teacher as consultant, during a period of self-directed learning.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This process should emulate what practitioners in the field would do (i.e., examine primary sources, make observations, design a product, conduct a survey . . .).
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The facilitator/consultant models metacognition associated with the type of problem-solving assigned and provides students with proper scaffolding.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Revisit the Problem (Cognitive Apprenticeship)
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Students meet in groups after some time has passed to evaluate the resources they have discovered and <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> apply what they have learned to the problem.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For each meeting, the groups has goals related to self-directed learning, content knowledge, and problem solving.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The process tends to follow a //hypothetico-deductive// methodology: as a result of their accumulation of knowledge and skills, students generate and test hypotheses that move them towards their final solution.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This an iterative process that lasts for five to eight weeks or even the entire semester, perhaps staged with sub-problems.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Assessment
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The process ends with a demonstration of learning with groups presenting their solutions
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Students participate in peer evaluations and self-reflections: self-directed learning, problem solving, & collaboration skills.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Teachers can use traditional tests to evaluate how students have met their own learning goals.