Chapter 2: Project-based Learning
Using Information Technology
Moursund, D.G. (1999). Project-based learning using information
technology. Eugene, OR: ISTE.
Reprinted with permission from ISTE (the International Society for
Technology in Education. 800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or
541.302.3777, cust_svc@iste.org, http://www.iste.org/.
Reprint permission does not constitute an endorsement by ISTE of the
product, training, or course. The materials that follow are
from a next-to-final version of the PBL book.
What is Project-based
Learning?
PBL From Student
Point of View
Learner
Centered, Intrinsically Motivating
Collaboration and
Cooperative Learning
Incremental and
Continual Improvement
Actively Engaged
Students
Product,
Presentation, or Performance
Challenging;
Focusing on Higher-Order Skills
PBL From Teacher
Point of View
Authentic
Content and Purpose
Authentic Assessment
Teacher Facilitated
Explicit Educational
Goals
Rooted in
Constructivism, but Uses Multiple Methods of
Instruction
Teacher as Learner
Didactic Versus
Constructivist Teaching
Curriculum
Instruction
Assessment
Activities
Chapter
2: Overview of IT-assisted PBL
This chapter contains an overview of project-based learning in an
information technology environment (IT-assisted PBL). It also
discusses "sage on the stage" versus "guide on the side."
What is Project-based
Learning?
The historical newspaper example from Chapter 1 illustrates a
number of the features that are common to many IT-assisted PBL
lessons. However, it is important to understand that there is no
universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes project-based
learning (PBL). Almost all teachers make some use of PBL, and the
projects they use vary widely in form and content.
In this book we are focusing specifically on PBL which is designed
to be carried out in an IT environment. Sometimes the focus of the
lesson will be mostly on IT. Most often, however, students gaining
increased IT knowledge and skills will be but one of the lessor goals
of the lesson.
Project-based learning is sometimes called problem-based learning,
and vice versa. In problem-based learning, the focus is on a specific
problem that is to be addressed. For example, the problem might be to
clean up a polluted stream running through one's city, or saving an
endangered species of plant or animal.
Project-based learning is a broader category of instruction than
problem-based learning. While a project may be to address a specific
problem, it can also focus on areas that are not problems. A key
characteristic of PBL is that a project does not focus on "learning
about" something. It focuses on "doing" something. It is action
oriented. In the historical newspaper example, students are doing
research, doing writing, doing peer feedback, doing the design of a
historically authentic newspaper, doing desktop publication, and
doing a presentation to the whole class.
The next two sections of this chapter list and discuss some of the
general characteristics of PBL. Half of the characteristics are
classified as being from the student point of view, and the remainder
are listed as being from the teacher point of view.
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PBL From Student
Point of View
PBL can be analyzed from the student point of view. (Of course,
some of the items in this list might as well be under the Teacher
Point of View.) Some of the characteristics include that PBL:
- Is learner centered and intrinsically motivating.
- Encourages collaboration and cooperative learning.
- Allows students to make incremental and continual improvement
in their product, presentation, or performance.
- Is designed so that students are actively engaged in "doing"
things rather then in "learning about" something.
- Requires students to produce a product, presentation, or
performance.
- Is challenging; focusing on higher-order skills.
Each of these six ideas is briefly discussed in the six sections
that follow.
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Learner
Centered, Intrinsically Motivating
- Students have considerable choice of topic as well as the
nature and extent of content of the project. Students are
intrinsically motivated as they shape their projects to fit their
own interests and abilities. A student may need to put in
substantial time and effort defining the specific project to be
carried out. The product, presentation, or production produced by
a student has a personal touch--it is representative of the
student.
- Essentially the same project assignment can be given to
students of considerably different academic backgrounds, grade
levels, and academic abilities. Students construct new knowledge
and skills, building on their current knowledge and skills.
- Students conduct research using multiple sources of
information, such as books, on-line databases, videotapes,
personal interviews (in-person or conducted via
telecommunications), and their own experiments. Even if their
projects are based on the same topic, different students will
likely make use of considerably different sources of
information.
- Students are included in the development of the assessment and
have full understanding of the assessment. They learn to assess
their own work.
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Collaboration
and Cooperative Learning
- A team of people may work on the project. The team may be an
entire class, several classes, or even students from several
remote sites. In these cases, individuals or small groups work on
different components of a large task, and their joint
collaborative efforts are often coordinated through technology.
Multi-site projects often rely on email or video
conferencing.
- Peer instruction is explicitly taught and encouraged. Students
learn to learn from each other and how to help their peers
learn.
- Students learn to assess the work of their peers. They learn
to provide constructive feedback to themselves and to their
peers.
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Incremental
and Continual Improvement
- The definition of what is to be accomplished as well as the
actual components and products in the project allow of continual
revision and incremental improvement during the time the work of
the project is being done.
- A project is viewed as a process rather than as a product.
There is a strong parallel between process-based writing and
project-based learning. One of the keys to good writing is
'revise, revise, revise." As work on the project proceeds, the
project itself and the work that needs to be done is under
continual review and may undergo substantial changes.
- A project is time-limited in scope. Thus, students must make
decisions about how to use their time. If too much time is spent
improving one component, the other components may not be of high
quality, so the overall project may suffer. One of the goals in a
typical PBL lesson is that students learn to make the necessary
decisions about producing an appropriate level of quality under
the time constraints that exist.
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Actively Engaged
Students
- The average classroom noise level is much higher than in a
traditional classroom, because students often work in groups, with
conversations, movement, sharing, and helping each other being the
norm.
- The teacher circulates within the classroom, interacting
briefly with individuals and groups, providing feedback and help
as appropriate. The teacher functions as a "guide on the side"
rather than as a "sage on the stage." Thus, students learn to be
more self reliant. They learn to seek help from each other or to
figure out things for themselves.
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Product,
Presentation, or Performance
- The project involves the design and development of a product,
presentation, or performance that can be used or viewed by others.
A product might be an artifact or exhibit, such as for a science
fair. It might be a written product or an interactive hypermedia
product. Students may simply present the results of their projects
in class as reports or posters. Other projects may extend beyond
the school boundaries in the form of stage or broadcast
performances, publications, and public events. Students may create
products of significant and lasting value, such as environmental
assessments or permanent information displays.
- A project may produce a product, presentation, or performance
that becomes a component of a student's portfolio.
- Information technology may be used as one of the vehicles or
components in the product, presentation, or performance.
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Challenging;
Focusing on Higher-Order Skills
- There is a focus on higher-order skills including problem
solving, becoming an independent researcher, setting one's own
goals, and self monitoring (self assessment).
- The project is designed to facilitate learning and learning to
learn. Each student is immersed in a rich learning environment
that includes feedback from self, peers, teachers, and others.
Students are expected to stretch their knowledge and skills. They
are expected to gain skills as an independent, self-sufficient
learner.
- The process of doing a project allows of and encourages
students to experiment, to do discovery-based learning, to learn
from their mistakes, and to encounter and overcome unexpected and
difficult challenges.
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PBL From Teacher
Point of View
PBL can be analyzed from the teacher point of view. Typically, a
project extends over a significant period of time, perhaps from
several week to an entire school year. Thus, a PBL lesson can be
viewed as a unit of study. Some of the characteristics include that
PBL:
- Has authentic content and purpose.
- Uses authentic assessment.
- Is teacher facilitated--but the teacher is much more of a
"guide on the side" rather than a "sage on the stage."
- Has explicit educational goals.
- Is rooted in constructivism. (A social learning theory.)
- Is designed so that the teacher will be a learner.
Each of these six ideas is briefly discussed in the six sections
that follow.
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Authentic
Content and Purpose
- The context for the subject matter tends to be complex and
authentic (real world, similar to problems and tasks that adults
address). Many projects focus on a specific current problem, such
as an environmental or social problem. The purpose of the project
is to help solve the problem. Such problems are complex and do not
have simple solutions.
- One goal of the project is to help students get better at
defining and carrying out projects in which there are limited
resources. You want your students to gain increased skill in
budgeting resources (such as their own time) and taking personal
responsibility for completing the project on time.
- The project usually cuts across a number of disciplines.
Students are expected to draw upon their full range of knowledge
and skills.
- The project requires students to do research that draws on
multiple sources of information. Such sources of information may
be both complex and contain contradictory information. Many
projects require empirical research.
- The project is consistent with and supportive of the general
goals of education as well as the specific goals and objectives of
the subject matter the teacher is responsible for teaching.
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Authentic
Assessment
- The overall assessment for student work is authentic.
Authentic assessment is sometimes called performance assessment
and it may include assessment of a student portfolio. In authentic
assessment, students are expected to solve challenging problems
and accomplish challenging tasks. The emphasis is on higher-order
thinking skills. In the same sense that the curriculum content in
PBL is authentic and real-world, the authentic assessment is a
direct measure of student performance and learning of the
authentic content. Students have a clear understanding of the
assessment guidelines, and assessment is guided by and directed
toward the product, presentation, or performance that is developed
by the project. (Chapter 7 contains more information about
assessment in PBL.)
- In PBL, students learn self-assessment and peer-assessment
(how to effectively provide constructive feedback to their
peers.)
- A student's product, presentation, or performance often
becomes part of the student's portfolio.
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Teacher
Facilitated
- The teacher acts as a facilitator and mentor, providing
resources and advice to students as they pursue their
investigations. However, the students collect and analyze the
information, make discoveries, and report their results. The
teacher is not the primary delivery system of information.
- The instruction and facilitation is guided by a broad range of
explicit teaching goals. Some of these goals may be narrowly
focused on specific subject matter content. Other goals will
likely be broader based, interdisciplinary, or discipline
independent. For example, there is explicit teaching for transfer
of learning. (Transfer of learning is discussed in Appendix C.)
Students will achieve additional (unforeseen) goals as they
explore complex topics from a variety of perspectives.
- The teacher looks for and acts on "teachable moments." Often
this will involve calling the whole class together to learn about
and discuss a particular (perhaps unexpected) situation that one
student or a team of students has encountered.
- The teacher is in charge of the class. The teacher has the
authority and bears the ultimate responsibility for curriculum,
instruction, and assessment. The teacher makes use of the tools
and methodology of authentic assessment. The teacher must face and
overcome the challenge that each student is constructing his/her
new knowledge and that the students are not all studying the same
content.
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Explicit
Educational Goals
- The project is designed to facilitate learning. It is designed
to help achieve the overall goals of education. It includes a
focus on specific educational goals, often cutting across several
disciplines.
- An explicit goal in every project is improving student ability
to function effectively in a Problem or Task Team environment. If
the project is being carried out by a multi-person team, then
learning to be an effective member of a team is an explicit goal
of the project.
- In IT-assisted PBL, the project is designed to facilitate
students learning about IT and how to make effective use of IT in
carrying out a project.
- The project is designed to help increase student ability to
carry out complex, challenging, real-world projects.
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Rooted in
Constructivism, but Uses Multiple Methods of
Instruction
- The design of the curriculum, instruction, and assessment is
rooted in constructivism. Constructivism is a theory about
knowledge and learning based on the idea that individual learners
construct their own knowledge, building on their current
knowledge.
- Students are provided time for reflection about what they are
learning. Often they make use of journals for this metacognitive
activity.
- An IT-assisted PBL lesson will usually include some direct,
explicit, (didactic) instruction. Often this will occur when the
teacher encounters a teachable moment--a problem encountered by an
individual student or a team of students, where the whole class
would benefit from explicit instruction.
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Teacher as
Learner
- The teacher is also a learner. The teacher and the students
learn together, and the teacher role-models being a lifelong
learner.
- The teacher allocates time to reflect on his/her
learning.
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Didactic Versus
Constructivist Teaching
This section summarizes some of the differences between the
didactic and constructivist models of instruction.
The Industrial Revolution began in England in the late 1700s. It
led to a mass movement of people from the farms into the cities. As
families were attracted to the cities in order to work in the
factories, the problem arose as to what to do with the children.
A solution to this problem was to develop public schools and to
require all children to attend. The schools that developed had many
characteristics of factories. Students were assumed to be nearly
alike. All students in a class were assumed to be ready to learn the
new topics specified in the curriculum. The teacher presented the
information to be learned, drilled students to facilitate
memorization, and tested the students. This type of teaching is often
described as didactic instruction or direct instruction.
This didactic factory model of education gradually spread
throughout the world. It has persisted for nearly 200 years and is
still the dominant model of instruction in most schools. This form of
instruction is often characterized as the teacher being a "sage on
the stage."
Constructivism is a learning theory that assumes a learner
constructs new knowledge, building on whatever base of knowledge the
learner already has. Constructivism is a relatively new learning
theory, although it is rooted in the work of Dewey and Piaget done
many years ago. Constructivism is based on our steadily increasing
understanding of the human brain--how it stores and retrieves
information, how it learns, and how learning is built on and extends
previous learning. Instruction based on constructivism is often
characterized as the teacher being a "guide on the side."
Few teachers teach in a purely didactic manner or in a purely
constructivist manner. Almost all teachers make use of both
approaches, switching from one to the other as seems appropriate at
the time. However, didactic and constructivist represent two quite
different philosophies of instruction and theories of learning. The
following tables are designed to stress differences between these two
approaches to teaching and learning. This table is an extension of
ideas presented in Sandholtz, Ringstaff, and Dwyer (1997, p. 14). The
topics listed have been grouped into three tables: Curriculum,
Instruction, and Assessment. There are substantial overlaps among
these three categories, so in many cases the assignment to a
particular category is somewhat arbitrary.
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Curriculum
|
Educational Component
|
Didactic curriculum
|
Constructivism-based curriculum
|
|
Concept of knowledge
|
Facts. Memorization. Discipline specific. Lower-order
thinking skills.
|
Relationships. Inquiry and invention. Higher-order
thinking skills. Represent and solve complex problems,
drawing on multiple resources over an extended period of
time.
|
|
Information technology as content
|
Taught in specific time blocks or courses that focus on
information technology
|
Integrated into all content areas, as well as being a
content area in its own right.
|
|
Information sources
|
Teacher, textbooks, traditional reference books and
CD-ROMs, use of a limited library, controlled access to
other information.
|
All previously available information sources. access to
people and information via the Internet and the WWW.
|
|
Information processing aids
|
Paper, pencil, and ruler. Mind.
|
All previously aids to processing information.
Calculator, computer.
|
|
Time schedule
|
Careful adherence to prescribed amounts of time each day
on specific disciplines.
|
Time scheduling is flexible, making possible long blocks
of time to spend on a project.
|
|
Problem solving. Higher-order thinking skills.
|
Students work alone on problems presented in textbook.
Problems are usually of limited scope. Modest emphasis on
higher-order thinking skills.
|
Students work individually and collaboratively on
multidisciplinary problems. Problems are typically of broad
scope and students pose or help pose the problems.
Substantial emphasis on higher-order thinking skills.
|
|
Curriculum
|
Focus on a specific discipline and a specific pre-charted
pathway through this curriculum.
|
Curriculum is usually interdisciplinary, without a pre
charted pathway. Different students study different
curriculum.
|
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Instruction
|
Educational Component
|
Didactic instruction
|
Constructivism-based instruction
|
|
Classroom activity
|
Teacher centered. Teacher driven. Teacher is responsible
for "covering" a set curriculum.
|
Learner centered. (Student-centered.) Cooperative.
Interactive. Student has increased responsibility for
learning. Collaborative tasks. Teams.
|
|
Teacher role
|
Dispenser of knowledge. Expert. Fully in charge.
Gatekeeper.
|
Collaborator, facilitator, learner.
|
|
Teacher-student interaction
|
Teacher lecture and questioning, student recitation.
|
Teacher works with groups, facilitating PBL.
|
|
Technology use
|
Computer-assisted learning (drill and practice, tutorial,
simulations). Tools used for amplification.
|
Communication, collaboration, information access,
information processing, multimedia documents and
presentations.
|
|
Instruction
|
Lecture/demonstration with quick recall student
recitation of facts, seat work, quizzes and exams. Single
discipline-oriented. "Sage on the stage."
|
Guide on the side. Mentoring. Discovery-based learning.
Peer instruction. Inter discipline-oriented.
|
|
Parent and home role. Community
|
Help on or encourage doing homework. Support
"traditional" education.
|
Parents and students learn from each other. Parents
contribute to projects. Home technology supplements school
technology.
|
|
Physical layout of classroom
|
Chairs arranged in rows in a fixed format. Chairs may be
bolted to the floor.
|
Movable furniture to facilitate easy regroupings of
furniture and students.
|
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Assessment
|
Educational Component
|
Didactic assessment
|
Constructivism-based assessment
|
|
Student role as a learner
|
Listener (often passive). Quite, well behaved. Raises
hand when prepared to respond to a teacher question. Studies
directed toward passing tests and completing required
work.
|
Collaborator. teacher, peer evaluator, Sometimes expert.
Actively engaged. Active learning. Problem poser. Active
seeker after knowledge. Students learn as they help each
other to learn.
|
|
Demonstration of success
|
Quantity and speed of recall.
|
Quality of understanding.
|
|
Use of technology during assessment
|
Allow simple tools such as paper, pencil, and ruler.
Sometimes allow calculator.
|
Students assessed in environment in which they learn.
|
|
Student work- products
|
Most student work -products are written and private,
shared only with the teacher. Occasional oral
presentation.
|
Much of the student work-products are public, subject to
review by teachers, peers, parents, and others. Multiple
forms of products
|
|
Assessment
|
Norm referenced. Objective and short answer. Focus on
memorization of facts. Discipline specific. Lower-order
thinking skills.
|
Criterion referenced. Authentic assessment of products,
performances, and presentations. Portfolio. Self assessment.
Peer assessment.
|
The next two chapters discuss possible IT-assisted PBL lesson
content areas and indicate how PBL can be used in meeting the goals
of education.
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Activities
- Select an example of PBL that you have experienced as a
student or facilitated as a teacher. Describe this example of PBL
and analyze it from the point of view of the student-oriented and
the teacher-oriented characteristics of IT-assisted PBL described
earlier in this chapter. What are its strengths and
weaknesses?
- Analyze your own teaching from a didactic versus
constructivist point of view. From your point of view, what are
the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches to teaching?
In your teaching, how do you capitalize on these strengths and
avoid the weaknesses?
- Analyze your current curriculum, instruction, and assessment
in terms of how well they contribute to your students learning to
function well in a P/T Team environment. Suggest some changes that
might contribute to your students gaining increased knowledge and
skills in solving problems and accomplishing tasks in this
environment.
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