Higher education across the US and worldwide acknowledges providing students with opportunities to collaboratively problem-solve an authentic challenge promotes equity and inclusion, while piquing students’ intrinsic interest in the discipline. With project-based learning and problem-based learning (PBL) your students engage in inquiry and collaboration as they work to help solve an authentic challenge. They learn and retain academic content knowledge and strengthen self-agency and other positive life skills and attitudes.
- In Stanford University’s Project-Based Learning Lab, students work collaboratively using inquiry to solve a real-life challenge and produce a related product.
- At DeVry University, the Introduction to Humanities course covers 3,000 years of Western Civilization. The course’s instructor, Professor Dominguez, states using PBL not only makes the vast curriculum accessible for the students but builds meaningful connections to it.
- Harvard Physics Professor Mazur and Harvard Teaching Fellow Gallegos provide project-based learning so students are intrinsically motivated to learn physics:
“ Rather than giving them the book and telling them, ‘Learn this it’s good for you,’ I put the book aside and I tell them, we’re going to work on some really exciting projects.
Once the students are completely excited about this project, I tell them, here, take a look at this book. It may actually help you with your project.
So the content, rather than being a goal in its own right, becomes a means to achieve a goal that’s more meaningful in the eyes of the student. I try to include in the project a component of empathy or social good.“
– Professor Eric Mazur
The ability to challenge-solve using critical thinking and inquiry is advocated by educators at all grade levels. However many college students graduate with little knowledge of how to use evidence to build a logical argument (Schneider, 2017) – let alone how to use findings for problem-solving.
To remedy this situation, colleges and universities nation and world wide encourage PBL across the disciplines. With PBLstudents are involved with inquiry and the inquiry is tied to content, which is the most effective path for inquiry learning.
Participants from over 100 colleges and universities from 25 states and 10 countries have participated in Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Project-Based Learning conferences. The conferences are held in partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The participants are from large public universities, small liberal colleges, private research universities, and community colleges who are chosen from an extensive applicant pool.
Harvard Graduate School of Education posted this statement to encourage PBL in Harvard courses:
To develop deep conceptual understanding of abstract concepts… students need to do more than just read textbooks or listen in lecture halls…In a Project-Based Learning approach, students try to solve challenging everyday problems by learning about and applying key class concepts. In a well-designed problem, students are meaningfully engaged in an authentic social problem that can only be solved if they deeply understand what is to be learned in the class. …project-based learning challenges students to be self-directed and take ownership of their learning.
College and graduate students are intellectually challenged, make academic gains, and their analytical and problem-solving skills, creativity, and independent learning are strengthened when they generate questions about a topic, develop answers by collecting, analyzing and synthesizing data, communicate their findings and self-assess their process and results (Justice, Rice, Warry, & Laurie, 2007; Spronken-Smith, Walker, Batchelor, O’Steen, & Angelo, 2012; Wurdinger, & Qureshi, 2015).
With quality PBL students experience deeper learning.
College & University PBL workshop will be in Maine, summer 2024 or bring it to your site.
References
Dominguez, A. (2016). Project-Based learning in the humanities: Creating
discourse and building cultural competence in the global university.
ICERI2016 Proceedings, pp. 8685-8693. Abstract
Justice, C., Rice, J., Warry, W. & Laurie, I. 2007. Taking an “Inquiry” course makes a
difference: A comparative analysis of student learning. Journal on
Excellence in College Teaching, 18(1): 57–77.
Schneider, C. G. (2017). Making inquiry learning our top priority: Why we
must and how we can. Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate
Research, 1(1), 45-54
Spronken-Smith, R., Walker, R., Batchelor, J., O’Steen, B., & Angelo, T. (2012).
Evaluating student perceptions of learning processes and intended
learning outcomes under inquiry approaches. Assessment and Evaluation
in Higher Education, 37(1), 57.
Wurdinger, S., & Qureshi, M. (2015). Enhancing college students’ life skills
through project based learning. Innovative Higher Education, 40(3), 279-
286.
Further Resources
Harvard Physics faculty Mazur and Gallegos cite these research studies:
Allen and colleagues describe the use of complex problems, with relevance to real-world problems, to engage and motivate students in undergraduate science classrooms (1996). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/tl.37219966808
According to LaForce, Noble, and Blackwell, project-based learning has the potential to promote student interest in science careers, by fostering intrinsic student motivation (2017). https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/7/4/92/htm