INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING

3 Key Characteristics of Project-Based Learning

Last Updated 25 October 2023/ By Zineb DJOUB

To foster students’ 21st-century skills, it has become necessary to integrate project-based learning. What are then the main characteristics of Project-based learning?

Project-based learning intends to support students learning by involving them in an inquiry that sparks their curiosity and critical thinking. This learning approach can help students develop the necessary strategies that support them to strive in this challenging world. These strategies include metacognitive strategies ( planning for research, reflecting on their process of inquiry, tracking their own progress, etc.), cognitive strategies (taking notes, collecting data, synthesising, evaluating gathered information, etc.), and social strategies (collaborating, taking turns, negotiating meaning, sharing, etc.).

Integrating project-based learning requires careful planning, strategies, and ongoing reflection on the part of teachers. So, not any act of assigning projects for students to conduct can be called project-based learning.

To get its potential here are 3 key characteristics of Project-Based Learning (PBL).

1. Teaching through the project

PBL needs to be considered as a partial component of the teaching-learning process. This means that you are going to teach through the project not teaching and then doing the project. To make that connection :

• Relate your project outcomes to your curriculum and learning goals: You can ask yourself: What are my students expected to learn out of the project? How does this learning relate to the lesson/unit’s learning outcomes? What other learning opportunities can this project provide?

Whenever you design PBL think about your curriculum and learning goals, and go beyond these to include other goals which relate to students’ needs (social and emotional skills).

• Integrate PBL: Teaching through the project does not only involve relating the project outcomes to our curriculum and learning goals, but it also requires integrating the project properly so that it will contribute to students’ learning.  To do so, you need to plan ahead for :

-the time required for students to complete the project,

-the roles to assign,

-the kind of choices provided  for students in terms of topics, expected

performances and ways of working on the project,

-how to narrow the scope of a project,

-the assessment criteria,

-how to get feedback and reflect,

-how to scaffold, and assess the project.

After making such decisions, you can start assigning the project, clarifying assessment criteria, and providing guidelines.  You can do so at the beginning of a given unit or at the end.

Support your students to connect what they are learning or have learned in the lessons with the project so that they can implement such learning to accomplish the project.

Also, make scaffolding an ongoing process. From time to time ask them how they are getting along with their projects. Listen to their inquiries and help.

Allow them to cooperate in class to complete their projects.  Take your time to check out their progress, observe how they are interacting and how each member is contributing to the whole group, and support them.

When you relate your learning goals to the project outcomes, you connect students’ learning with the project.  Besides, you support them in understanding how valuable are those projects to their learning progress, thereby making them more engaged in learning through them.

2. Connecting the project with the real world

Doing projects requires students’ reflection, decision, cooperation, collecting data, writing, etc. Students need to get motivated and engaged to take on such hard work. This can only happen if they see the relevance of getting involved in this process.

To achieve this, base your projects on authentic real-world problems that grab students’ attention, stimulate their thinking, and drive them towards conducting research. So, select relevant, up-to-date issues that relate to students’ lives and are worth investigating

To avoid a lack of real-world -connection ask yourself: what do you want your students to remember from this experience in 10 years? How does this relate to their future career?

When starting a project that is organised around a driving question,

ask students to generate a list of what they feel they need to know to successfully and completely answer that question. This can make them more engaged, relating the project to their concerns and inquiries.

 

3. Promoting Students’ Autonomy

Within PBL students are responsible for designing and managing much of their learning.  So, to support your students in developing more ownership over their learning here are some tips to consider :

• Think about how to build voice and choice into a project. You can choose the teams for the project yourself based on your knowledge of students. But, allow them to choose the topic they like to work on, the way they want to investigate it, and the kind of performance to present their projects (using posters, PowerPoint, drawings, etc.)
• Assign interdependent roles to students and mix up students in groups each time. When the team goal is tied to the learning of each individual, team members care about each other’s learning and actively help each other. See an example of these roles below.
• Provide students with several opportunities to review and revise their project work to support them in delivering a polished performance. You can give checklists to help them track their own progress and gain the criteria.  Give comments rather than grades during these assessments to focus attention on the quality of work rather than the worker.
• Assess students individually. Individual learning growth must be measured by each student’s performance to ensure that everyone has an equal chance of success.

Let’s go back to assigning students’ roles. These roles can include :

• The Manager: who is in charge of controlling the work of each individual within the group. He, in collaboration with other members, makes decisions such as writing the research plan and listing the questions they need to address and the sources they will read. The manager also organises meetings, reports to the teacher about the group’s progress, and reviews the final work.
• The Researcher: makes internet research and heads to the library to get the relevant resources for the project. The researcher also conducts surveys or uses any other data collection tool to gather data, analyses, and report them. If you have 4 team members in each group, you can have two researchers. In such a case, you need to share roles between them.
• The Facilitator: is the one who reviews, organises all the information provided by the researcher and edits the final work. Making some reading about the investigated topic is also necessary here as it will assist him in reviewing the work.  The facilitator is also supposed to have certain computer skills because he is responsible for reporting the work.

It is important to note that assigning roles does not mean pushing students to work individually. Students have to collaborate even if their roles differ.

The researcher has to inform other members about the information gathered and get their support for collecting data and analysing them.

The facilitator has to communicate with the researcher to understand why he has opted for such data, and data collection tools and know more about the respondents’ interaction (in the case of a case study).  Whereas the manager has to keep an eye on what is going on, talking to the members, tracking materials, tasks, etc.

On the day of the presentations, you can ask all the members to share their work and speak about their experiences.

Students need to understand that the success of group work does not only depend on their commitment to such roles but also their collaboration. Because each one’s task depends on the other’s.

So do you want to support your students learn through their projects? Make these 3 characteristics your goal, because these are essential for the success of any PBL.  Plan for them, you can make PBL a fruitful learning experience for your students.