PBL promotes educational equity.

Project Based Learning’s time has come.

Specifically, these skills are described as:

how to read, write, and participate in the digital world has become the 4th basic foundational skill next to the three Rs—reading, writing, and arithmetic

we need to provide people with open access to the skills and know-how needed to use the web to improve their lives, careers, and organizations.

1) develop more educators, advocates, and community leaders who can leverage and advance the web as an open and public resource, and 2) impact policies and practices to ensure the web remains a healthy open and public resource for all.

we presented PBL as steps, it really functions cyclically.

During the PBL assessment step, evaluate the groups’ products and performances. Use rubrics to determine whether students have clearly communicated the problem, background, research methods, solutions (feasible and research-based), and resources, and to decide whether all group members participated meaningfully. You should consider having your students fill out reflections about their learning (including what they’ve learned about the content and the research process) every day, and at the conclusion of the process.

After researching, the students create products and presentations that synthesize their research, solutions, and learning.

PBL research begins with small-group brainstorming sessions where students define the problem and determine what they know about the problem (background knowledge), what they need to learn more about (topics to research), and where they need to look to find data (databases, interviews, etc.). Groups should write the problem as a statement or research question. They will likely need assistance.

If PBL is new to your students, you can practice with an “easy problem,” such as a scenario about long lines in the dining hall.

Next you design the PBL scenario with an embedded problem that will emerge through student brainstorming. Think of a real, complex issue related to your course content. It’s seldom difficult to identify lots of problems in our fields; the key is writing a scenario for our students that will elicit the types of thinking, discussion, research, and learning that need to take place to meet the learning outcomes.

After determining whether your course has learning outcomes that fit with PBL, you will develop formative and summative assessments to measure student learning. Group contracts, self/peer-evaluation forms, learning reflections, writing samples, and rubrics are potential PBL assessments.

By breaking down the PBL cycle into six steps, you can begin to design, implement, and assess PBL in your own courses.

he research on project based learning tells us that it closes the achievement gap for underserved populations, improves understanding and retention of content, and increases motivation for all students.

It is becoming abundantly clear to educators and employers that students need to be able to do more than spit out facts.

Even if we are able to design a project that has them apply their knowledge in real-world ways, the project is often hypothetical—students know it’s still a school assignment, so they aren’t as engaged as they would be if it were real. Project based learning doesn’t just add a dose of relevance to the standard model; it builds the learning within a relevant context from the very start, so students are naturally more engaged.

To do this, they would need to study microbiology to understand how viruses work, research prevention tools, then use their writing and speaking skills to determine the most effective means to convince their peers to change their habits; this may come in the form of a video or poster series.

A PBL project might ask students to educate their peers on the best ways to prevent the spread of viruses in school.

With project based learning, the content is baked inside of a long-term project, a real-world problem students need to solve in a creative and authentic way. In the process of solving the problem, students also meet required standards, but this work is integrated into the project, not separate from it.

In a traditional classroom, we deliver content to students, give them opportunities to practice or apply what they learned, and eventually conduct a summative assessment—this could take the form of a test or it could be more of a performance assessment, like an essay, a speech, or a project of some kind.