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YSEALI Edu #3: PBL vs Projects

Updated: Aug 21, 2019

PBL vs projects

Many teachers have their students do projects. Science Fair is a good example. Students do their own experiments, usually at home with help from their parents, and then they present their work to judges. While there is some value in doing projects, they are not the same as project-based learning.

Researchers have identified 5 key elements of project-based learning:

Challenging problem or question that relates to the real world and addresses content that is central to the curriculum

Sustained Inquiry

Collaboration that includes student choice,

reflection and revision

Final Product that is (ideally) meaningful outside school

In PBL, class projects are designed around a question that encourages students to explore multiple aspects of a problem. Ideally this problem relates to the community around the school. As students work towards a solution to the problem, they learn content that the teacher is required to teach (central to the curriculum). These questions drive instruction so they are called driving questions.

PBL projects last from several weeks to months (E-Zine

). Students work in groups to answer the question and they may also be mentored by adults from the community. They produce something meaningful beyond school. The product could be a public service announcement, a proposal for a city council, a position paper on a community issue, a website that teaches others about an important issue, etc.,

So, Project-based learning is not just doing projects. It's using projects to teach the curriculum. Below is a table that shows some similarities and differences between traditional projects and PBL.

Project-Based Learning

Traditional Projects

Student Investigations

Product/Artifact

Collaborative

Individual

Central to the Curriculum

Auxiliary (extra)

Long term

Short Term

Whole class examines an issue

Individuals examine an issue

Occupy significant class time

Done mostly outside of class

Project = learning process and assessment

Project = assessment

You may be wondering how personal learning fits withing the PBL model. Good PBL projects cannot be completed by individual students so students need to collaborate to complete the final product. Additionally, good PBL units allow individual students to approach the solution to the problem in different ways.

This page has links to videos of PBL classes with high quality project-based units.

If the spoken English is too fast for you, you can click on CC in the lower left corner after you start the video. This will bring up English text.

 
 
 

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