In Project Based Learning (PBL), students go through an extended process of inquiry in response to a complex question, problem, or challenge. While allowing for some degree of student "voice and choice," a rigorous process is carefully designed, managed, and assessed to help students learn key academic content, practice 21st Century Skills (such as collaboration, communication & critical thinking), and create high-quality, authentic products & presentations.
Research suggests that effective use of PBL methods can prepare students to be flexible thinkers who can work productively with others to solve problems. Moreover, the PBL method has been demonstrated to increase different types of problem-solving skills in students, from describing specific processes needed to address a particular problem, to increasing the depth and breadth of solutions. Research also suggests that PBL can help students develop self-directed learning skills.
Rigorous, meaningful and effective PBL:
Research suggests that effective use of PBL methods can prepare students to be flexible thinkers who can work productively with others to solve problems. Moreover, the PBL method has been demonstrated to increase different types of problem-solving skills in students, from describing specific processes needed to address a particular problem, to increasing the depth and breadth of solutions. Research also suggests that PBL can help students develop self-directed learning skills.
Rigorous, meaningful and effective PBL:
- is intended to teach significant content. Goals for student learning are explicitly derived from content standards (TEKS) and key concepts at the heart of academic disciplines.
- requires inquiry as part of the process of learning and creating something new. To achieve profound learning, or learning that is transferable to multiple contexts, learners must engage actively with learning sources. Students ask questions, search for answers, and arrive at conclusions, leading them to construct something new: an idea, an interpretation, or a product.
- requires critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and various forms of communication. To create high-quality work, students need to do much more than remember information. They must listen to others and make their own ideas clear when speaking, be able to read a variety of material, write or otherwise express themselves in various modes, and make effective presentations. These skills, competencies and habits of mind are often known as “21st century skills,” because they are prerequisite for success in college and the workforce.
- creates a need to know essential content and skills. PBL reverses the order in which information and concepts are traditionally presented. Learning begins with the vision of an end product or presentation. This creates a context and reason to be engaged, learn, and understand the information and concepts.
- allows some degree of student voice and choice. Students learn to work independently and take responsibility when they are asked to make choices. The opportunity to make choices, and to express their learning in their own voice, also helps to increase students’ educational engagement.
- includes processes for revision and reflection. Students learn to give and receive feedback in order to improve the quality of the products they create, and are asked to think about what and how they are learning.
- involves a public audience. Students present their work to other people, beyond their classmates and teacher. This “ups the stakes,” increasing students’ motivation to do high-quality work, and adds to the authenticity of the project.
- Students are more active in the learning process. Students engage with a problem with whatever their current knowledge/experience affords. Inherent in the design of PBL is a public articulation by the learners of what they know and about what they need to learn more.
- The problem simulations used in PBL must be ill-structured, present a challenge, and allow for inquiry. Problems in the real world are ill-structured (or they would not be problems). A critical skill developed through PBL is the ability to identify the problem and set parameters on the development of a solution.
- Collaboration is essential. In the world after school most learners will find themselves in jobs where they need to share information and work productively with others. PBL provides a format for the development of these essential skills.
- What students learn during their self-directed learning must be applied back to the problem with reanalysis and resolution.
- Assessments must measure student progress towards the goals of problem-based learning. The goals of PBL are both knowledge-based and process-based. Students need to be assessed on both dimensions at regular intervals to ensure that they are benefiting as intended from the PBL approach. Students are responsible for the content in the curriculum that they have “covered” through engagement with problems. They need to be able to recognize and articulate what they know and what they have learned.
- The reality is that learners who are new to PBL require significant instructional scaffolding to support the development of problem-solving skills, self-directed learning skills, and teamwork/collaboration skills to a level of self-sufficiency where the scaffolds can be removed.