Project-based learning

This article provides a short introduction to project-based learning in the framework of more open-ended projects that are typical of socio-constructivist approaches. Please, see project-oriented learning for a more general introduction.

Introduction

The notion of project is central to socio-constructivism and other related activity-based approaches. A project allows learners to identify and formulate their own problems. The goals they set as well as the unexpected discoveries they will make during their interaction with the environment serve as guides (Collins et al, 1989). It is therefore important to divide scenarios into sequences and to divide problems into sub-problems so that learners perform only one task at a time and that these tasks are flexible enough in order for learners to be able achieve them whatever their basic level. Project-based learning is a model which distinguishes from traditional teaching since the focus is put on the learner and his project. Learners have the opportunity to work more autonomously and build their knowledge.

The context

These design ideas are based on various socio-constructivist schools of thought (Bruner, 1973), but can also be found in other modern instructional theories (Ausubel, Novak and Hanesian, 1978 ; Reigeluth, 1999). We consider socio-constructivism as an understanding of learning that stresses the importance of constructing knowledge based on previous knowledge and interaction with the social environment, e.g. theories that have followed from constructivism (Piaget), socio-culturalism (Vygotsky, 1962) and situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Secondly, we perceive socio-constructivism as a set of pedagogies that use strategies like project-based learning (Thomas, Mergendoller and Michaelson, 1999), problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, case-based learning or action learning. We call these new pedagogies « activity-based », since the students learn with interactive technology (instead of from) and since the teacher has to design, to facilitate and to monitor student activities. While each of these designs has different pedagogical objectives, we believe that all good pedagogical designs should include somewhat structured pedagogical scenarios and that the teacher's role is crucial. In this perspective, the modern teacher has to fulfill a triple role of facilitator, manager and « orchestrator » and he needs adequate supporting environments since such designs can become very complex and costly.

« The reason that Dewey, Papert, and others have advocated learning from projects rather than from isolated problems is, in part, so that students can face the task of formulating their own problems, guided on the one hand by the general goals they set, and on the other hand by the 'interesting' phenomena and difficulties they discover through their interaction with the environment » (Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989, p. 487). Powerful pedagogical designs that aim at the development of general problem skills, deeper conceptual understanding and more applicable knowledge include, according to van Merriënboer and Pass (2003, p. 3), the following characteristics : « (1) the use of complex, realistic and challenging problems that elicit in learners active and constructive processes of knowledge and skill acquisition ; (2) the inclusion of small group, collaborative work and ample opportunities for interaction, communication and co-operation ; and (3) the encouragement of learners to set their own goals and provision of guidance for students in taking more responsibility for their own learning activities an processes. ». See also combined complex instructional design models like 4C/ID.

Project-based learning

Project Based Learning is a teaching and learning model (curriculum development and instructional approach) that emphasizes student-centered instruction by assigning projects. It allows students to work more autonomously to construct their own learning, and culminates in realistic, student-generated products. More specifically, project-based learning can be defined as follows :

1. Engaging learning experiences that involve students in complex, real-world projects through which they develop and apply skills and knowledge
2. Learning that requires students to draw from many information sources and disciplines in order to solve problems
3. Learning in which curricular outcomes can be identified up-front, but in which the outcomes of the student's learning process are neither predetermined nor fully predictable
4. Experiences through which students learn to manage and allocate resources such as time and materials.

Difficulties

Projects are complex endeavours involving many different activities. In particular students have trouble for (a) initiating inquiry, formulate coherent research questions; (b) define a research project; (c) direct investigations; find resources, (d) manage time; keep deadlines, estimate time needed to do a task, (e) collaborate and give feedback; articulate work of others and give regular feedback, (f) follow-up the project; revise products. In addition to the difficulty of setting clear goals for various phases, students have trouble relating data, concept and theory. A teacher should orchestrate a project into several more or less sequential scenarios who in turn can be broken down to smaller phases. This will insure that learners will focus on smaller sub-problems, will do things in the right order (e.g define research goals in the beginning of the project and not in the middle).

Implementation Levels

Activity-based, collaborative, and construction-based pedagogies can be implemented at three levels: (1) the micro-level, i.e. smaller pedagogical scenarios or projects which can be components for larger projects, (2) long term projects, i.e. project-based classes and (3) the general study environment favoring student initiative and community building on which we will come back later.While micro activities (lasting only over a single or a few lessons) can not reach the same goals as true project-based teaching, they nicely can complement traditional instruction and are often the only realistic alternative in today's organization of the school and university system.We now will examine particular instructional design issues, first at the level of smaller scenarios and then for larger project-oriented classes.

See also: project-oriented learning for a wider discussion of different frameworks.

Scenarization

Effectiveness is not guaranteed if the teacher simply asks students to do projects, to engage in writing activities, to learn together or at least to profit from each other's ideas. We assume that the risk is quite high to observe that students cannot start, get lost or are otherwise unproductive. We therefore suggest to create semi-structured pedagogical scenarios that define an orchestrated sequence of learning activities. Such a scenario is often called a « script » in the literature, and in particular, in the field of Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) that Dillenbourg, Schneider and Synteta (2002) define as a story or scenario that the students and tutors have to play just in the same way as actors play a movie script. Such pedagogical scripts can become very sophisticated : for each phase, the script specifies the tasks that students have to perform, the composition of the group, the way that the task is distributed within and among the groups, the mode of interaction and the timing of phase. Phases are ordered and connected, i.e. outputs of one phase become inputs of the next phase. Pedagogical scripts are mostly sequential, at least from the student's perspective. However, it does not mean that these are merely instructions that the learners have to follow. Tasks can and should often be defined as mere goals, e.g. that at some point the teacher can ask students to hunt out and to formulate definitions of the objects they will have to study although the way they do it is left open. In other words, when designing and executing pedagogical scenarios the teacher has to respect a harmonious equilibrium between the freedom left to students that is necessary for intellectual development and motivation on one hand, and certain guiding principles on the other hand.

Structured activity-based teaching involves sequencing scenarios and therefore breaking the « problem » into parts so that the students are challenged to master as many tasks as they are ready to handle. From a more abstract perspective, scenarios evolve in cycles, e.g. a typical teaching/learning phase has more or less the following elements (in whatever order) :

1. Do
2. Deposit
3. Look
4. Discuss

Resources, tools and products play an important role. Each time a student does something, there should be a product (even as small as a little message) that is deposited somewhere and that can be looked at and discussed. Below is an alternative but very similar loop showing that there are variants of the same principle: Things are looked at, things are produced and discussion happens. It is the principle of information seeking, production and interaction that counts.

1. Look (discovery)
2. Discuss (interaction)
3. Do (production)
4. Deposit (sharing)
5. Feedback (discussion of results)

The teacher's manager role is to make sure that such loops are productive, e.g. that the students produce something, that it is task related, that they engage themselves in meta-reflection (look critically at their own work) and that they discuss and share with others. The teacher's facilitator role is to help students with their tasks, e.g. help them to select resources and tools, explain difficult concepts and procedures, "debug" when they are stuck etc. The teacher's orchestrator role is to implement (or most frequently also to create) the scenarios or scripts as they are also called. This means basically to define a scenario as a sequence of clearly identifiable phases in a way that learners focus on a smaller amount of tasks at the same time and that these tasks are not too difficult to be solved at some point.

Let's have a look at a simple example. Imagine that for a given purpose, students need references for a project. We can turn this into a pedagogical activity with a scenario that includes the following steps:

1. The teacher introduces the theme, gives clues and asks students to consider the different aspects of the subject (Discuss).
2. Students search the web with various search engines and bookmark the links they find interesting (Look, Deposit).
3. Students then try to work out a certain amount of categories and sub-categories for this theme (Look, Do, Deposit).
4. The results are put in common and a hierarchy is worked out (Look, Do, Discuss).
5. The approved categories are entered in a common space (e.g. the classroom wall, a sheet of paper or an electronic links management system) (Deposit).
6. Students classify, enter and describe their links (Do, Deposit).
7. Teacher provides an evaluation (Discuss).

More such scenarios are suggested for example in the TECFA SEED Catalog in terms of scenarios (activities), its constituant elementary activities and supporting technology. As we said before, scenarios should not be "over-scripted", the student should in general be its own master of the tasks and tasks should have some flavor of authenticity. Along similar lines, the teacher should not directly interfere with student's products, but only give feedback and evaluation and let the student fix things himself. Defining a scenario therefore is a workflow design problem, but with the idea that pedagogical workflows are different from the ones in industry. In industry the goal is the product, in education the goal is apprenticeship, i.e. what the student has learnt from performing a set of activities

The role of Tools

As the above example shows, most activity-based, constructive and collaborative pedagogies do not necessarily need any special tools, but work can be made more efficient (after some adaptation period) and certainly more powerful by adopting some support technology. Walls in a classroom run out of space, paper is lost and collaboration within the classroom is under heavy time constraints and "home work" lacks the sort of support that classroom activities have. Content needs to managed, knowledge exchange must be organized, discussion tools must favor exchange of arguments, projects must run, and generated knowledge must be managed.

What kinds of productions could typically happen in such a workflow approach?

1. Gathering and distribution of information : teachers and learners share resources and the activities are designed to help them gather information and make it available to all.
2. Creation of collaborative documents : here the students can write definitions, analyze cases, solve problems, write documents and create illustrated documents together around specific themes.
3. Discussion and comments about the productions : learners identify together facts, principles and concepts and clarify complex ideas. They formulate hypotheses and plan solutions, make links between ideas, compare different points of view, argue, evaluate... ?
4. Project management related activities : learners can decide work plans, share tasks and form groups, decide a schedule and so forth. Teachers can distribute and regulate tasks.

Internet technology supports most open-ended, creative and active pedagogies, as long as students can also be producers (not just readers and exercise button pushers). While there is an interesting number of enabling software and while activity-based (e.g. project or problem-based) scenarios are quite popular (Reigeluth, 1999 ; Wilson and Lowry 2001), they are not supported by the same number of technologies as the scenarios inspired by more traditional instructional design are. Exceptions like the Knowledge Forum System are rare. Besides commonly used tools like HTML pages and forums, there exist quite a number of interesting tools like participatory content management systems (e.g. Weblogs), and collaborative hypertexts in various forms (e.g. Wikis). However, we like to push one step further, i.e. provide teachers with a fairly integrated configurable platform of tools. Technical requirements for active and rich pedagogies are not extremely demanding, but interesting results could already be obtained by providing the following sort of functionalities :

1. Access to rich information sources (not just stream-lined e-learning blocks) by various means, e.g. browsing, searching by categories or popularity, searching by keywords.
2. Affordable interaction with various types of information contents (including annotation).
3. Rich interactions between actors, that are facilitated by awareness mechanisms (who did what, what is new, etc.)
4. Simple integration of these activities through a « place ».

Activity-based pedagogies assign a better diverse role to documents used. Learners generally select by themselves the documents they need from a larger choice (which includes the whole Internet). More importantly, they actively participate in the production of documents, some of which can be reused later on. Ideally, they also should be allowed to annotate documents, i.e. enrich them by their own experience. Writing in this perspective concerns producing short texts in various genres (questions, arguments, links, definitions, etc.). These learner productions plus interactions are meant to provoke various meta-cognitive mechanisms beneficial to learning e.g. conceptual change and deeper understanding (Klein 1999). In general terms, activity-based teaching needs mainly a computer as a facilitating structure, a thinking, working and communication tool instead of a content transmission device. Accordingly, most student and teacher activities should be supported by computational tools and lead to new « contents ». Within this perspective we can see that activities and roles are defined in a collaborative expressive digital media framework.

• See: C3MS as a way to implement this sort of design

Other tools:

• NoteStar Assist students with collecting group notes and citations for papers.
• PBL CheckList
• Think Tank is designed to help students (grades 3-8) develop a Research Organizer (a list of topics and subtopics) for reports and projects

The general study environment

The community factor is particularly important in open and distance learning situations. As formulated by e-learning practitioner Gilroy (2001) « E-learning should be first and foremost about creating a social space that must be managed for the teaching and learning needs of the particular group of people inhabiting that space ». While a large part of our knowledge comes indeed from formally planned learning scenarios, people learn a lot from informal exchange with fellow learners, with professors, experts, i.e. from exchange within tightly or loosely defined communities (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

It is very important that teaching should generate enthusiasm, enhance concentration and favor creativity, which are very distinct, but somehow interconnected phenomena. Rieber Smith and Noah (1998) convincingly argue that learning process itself -and not just the result- should be interesting, if one seeks higher motivation among learners. « Serious play » or « hard fun » are intense learning situations where learners are investing a lot of « energy » and time, that provide equally intensive pleasure at certain moments which have been identified as «  flow » or « optimal experience » by Csikszentmihalyi

According to Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi and Gardner (1994), creativity should be studied and therefore facilitated by the teacher at three different levels : (1) the social field, e.g. a network of people who provide cognitive and affective support, instruction, evaluation, recognition, etc. ; (2) the domain (symbol systems of knowledge) ; and (3) the individual, i.e. intellectual traits, personal traits and cognitive structures. It is clear that education cannot influence all variables, but pedagogical design certainly can have a positive influence on individual dispositions that already exist. It can act upon conditions, i.e. on educational tasks and the general learning environment like the « class spirit » with the help of specially designed technology that we will introduce later on. By exposing students to open-ended, challenging, authentic and partly self-defined projects on one hand and by providing scaffolding and support on the other hand, the teacher does create situations where individual traits can be exposed and developed.

By taking into accout input from community of practice, flow theory, creativity theory etc. we can define a few desiderata for the design of portals as holistic learning environments:

First, the portal should be a rich information space for « domain support » and it should encourage students to add their own contribution. Such a space also encourages exploration. The typical tools used are links managers, Wikis, news engines and RSS feed that keep users up-to-date about articles posted to other interesting portals or individual Weblogs. Intellectual support is provided via forums, annotations and articles. Student productions are always accessible to all (including visitors) and therefore provide for recognition. In our experience, it has been shown that students are more likely to contribute to an environment if they own an identity. In the student's partly automatically generated home page on the portal one can see their contributions, read public parts of their personal Weblog and conversely each production in the portal is signed with a clickable link to the author. In addition, we developed a tool that allows to list and display in detail all student productions throughout the various tools. A successful teaching by projects pedagogy needs to provide strong emotional support and it is therefore important to encourage spontaneous, playful interaction and corners for humor that will augment quality of on-line life and contribute to class spirit. Tools like the shoutbox or a little quotation box can do wonders. Last, but not least, a personal Weblog (diary) can stimulate meta-reflection, in particular if the teacher requires that students write an entry after the completion of each activity.

Our observations lead us to conclude that pedagogical portals should also be designed in the spirit of true virtual environments that have drawn a lot of attention in the last decade. A pedagogical virtual environment (VE) consists in a constructed virtual information space built with the appropriate tools as outlined above. A virtual environment (VE) is also a social space, where pedagogical interactions take place.

References

• Ausubel, D., J. Novak and H. Hanesian (1978). Educational Psychology : A Cognitive View, 2nd Edition, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

• Bruner, J. (1973). Going Beyond the Information Given, New York, Norton.

• Class, Barbara et Mireille Bétrancourt (2004) Un portail en éducation à distance : vers quelle ergonomie pédagogique ? / Ergonomics, community portal and distance learning : some pedagogical issues", Actes Ergo'IA 2004 [1]

• Collins, A., J.S. Brown and S.E. Newman (1989). « Cognitive apprenticeship : Teaching the crafts of reading, writing, and mathematics », in L.B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, Learning, and Instruction : Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser, Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, p. 453-494.

• Dillenbourg, P., D. Schneider and V. Synteta (2002). « Virtual learning environments », in Proceedings of The 3rd Congress on Information and Communication Technologies in Education, Rhodes, Kastaniotis Editions, p. 3-18.

• Feldman, D.H., M. Csikszentmihalyi and H. Gardner (1994). Changing The World, A Framework for the Study of Creativity, Westport, Praeger.

• Lave, J. and E. Wenger (1991). Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.

• Mergendoller, John R. and John W. Thomas, Managing Project Based Learning: Principles from the Field, The Buck Institute for Education, PDF

• Morsund, David (2002) Project-based learning: Using Information Technology, 2nd edition, ISTE. ISBN 1-56484-196-0

• Perrenoud, Philippe, Apprendre à l\u2019école à travers des projets : pourquoi ? comment ? Educateur, 2002, n° 14, pp. 6-11 HTML

• Reigeluth, C.M. (1999) (Ed.). Instructional-Design Theories and Models : A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Note: It seems that a new volume is under preparation (DSchneider 12:45, 13 May 2006 (MEST)).

• Rieber, L.P., L. Smith and D. Noah (1998). « The value of serious play », Educational Technology, 38(6), p. 29-37. [http ://itech1.coe.uga.edu/~lrieber/valueofplay.html]

• Thomas, J. W., Mergendoller, J.R., & Michaelson, A. (1999). Project-based learning: A handbook for middle and high school teachers. Novato, CA: The Buck Institute for Education.

• Thom Markham et al. (2003), Project Based Learning Handbook, Buck Inst for Education, ISBN 0974034304

• Thomas, J. W. (2000). A review of research on project-based learning. PDF - PDF - HTML Summary

• Schneider, Daniel. (2005) "Gestaltung kollektiver und kooperativer Lernumgebungen" in Euler & Seufert (eds.), E-Learning in Hochschulen und Bildungszentren. Gestaltungshinweise für pädagogische Innovationen, München: Oldenbourg. Preprint in PDF

• Schneider, Daniel with Paraskevi Synteta, Catherine Frété, Fabien Girardin, Stéphane Morand (2003) Conception and implementation of rich pedagogical scenarios through collaborative portal sites: clear focus and fuzzy edges. ICOOL International Conference on Open and Online Learning, December 7-13, 2003, University of Mauritius.

• Schneider Daniel & Paraskevi Synteta (2005). Conception and implementation of rich pedagogical scenarios through collaborative portal sites, in Senteni,A. Taurisson,A. Innovative Learning & Knowledge Communities / les communautés virtuelles: apprendre, innover et travailler ensemble", ICOOL 2003 & Colloque de Guéret 2003 selected papers, a University of Mauritius publication, under the auspices of the UNESCO, ISBN-99903-73-19-1. PDF Preprint

• van Merriënboer, J.G. and F. Pass (2003). « Powerful learning and the many faces of instructional design : Toward a framework for the design of powerful learning environments », in E. De Corte, L. Verschaffel, N. Entwistle and J.G. van Merriënboer (Eds), Powerful Learning Environments : Unraveling Basic Components and Dimensions, Amsterdam, Pergamon, p. 3-20.

• Wilson, B. and M. Lowry (2001). « Constructivist learning on the Web », in L. Burge (Ed.), Learning Technologies : Reflective and Strategic Thinking, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. [1]

Notes

This is more or less copy/paste text from Schneider & Synteta (2005 and our TecfaSeed Catalog. A better version will be written once we are done with describing other project-oriented / activity-based designs. DSchneider 12:45, 13 May 2006 (MEST)