Week 4 discussion topic 2

¶ … Education

Project-Based Assessment

Project-Based Learning (PBL), by design, lends itself to differentiated instruction. It uses a student-centric approach-- an extended learning process that incorporates inquiry and challenge to stimulate the growth and mastery of skills (Prescott, 2012). PBL allows teachers great flexibility in meeting the needs of students, handling assessments and managing daily instruction. As brought out by the course videos, teamwork and collaboration occurs regularly in PBL projects. Students of different academic performance levels often have a chance to learn from and teach one another. Differentiation critical in these multi-intelligence team settings and the PBL model not only allows students to learn in the format best suited to them, ultimately they are afforded a chance to reflect on their work and set goals for further learning. Instruction becomes personalized and targeted, which is much more engaging than standardized teaching approaches and strict lesson plans.

Benefits of PBL to students include more stimulating and interesting educational experiences. Students are co-creators in their instruction, serving as the center of the learning process. The ability to design lessons and follow them through time (over the course of a full, academic year, for example) creates a richer understanding of the material. For students, PBL integrates knowing and doing (Heitin, 2012). Students learn knowledge and elements of the core curriculum, but also apply what they know to solve real problems and produce results that matter by working together and then exhibiting their work as a collective. The benefits can be far-reaching. Families and communities can also participate by sponsoring and supporting PBL-based projects (i.e., community or school gardens, company sponsored contests, etc.). In this way, community resources can be leveraged creatively, giving students a platform to carry out meaningful work and also demonstrate their new knowledge and skills to audiences that reinforce and encourage their efforts. PBL refocuses education on the student, not the curriculum -- a shift made necessary by our ever expanding global world, which rewards intangible assets such as drive, passion, creativity, empathy, and resiliency (Markham, 2011). These values cannot be taught from textbooks -- they must be activated through experience. This is the true value of PBL.

A major challenge, and often criticism, of PBL is that differentiated assessments are too difficult to manage and that academic standards cannot be maintained. However, standards can be embedded in the projects. With project-based learning, students are given a major task that requires higher-order thinking skills to achieve, but also requires the learning and practicing of lower-level skills along the way (Heitin, 2012). The educator can thoughtfully map out a project matrix to track how select activities satisfy select state objectives. For instance, Heitin shares how in one program for at-risk youth, educators build such grids with the content subjects on the horizontal axis and phases of the project on the vertical (2012). State standards are embedded in the resulting boxes and progress towards learning/project goals are mapped. As an example, if a student is doing beekeeping as a part of a PBL project, he or she might need to research and write a paper on bee behavior to address a language arts standard. Students are engrossed in the activity at hand, being led by their own curiosity, aptitudes and interest. Unknowingly, they are also completing and passing academic assessments along the way. A well-executed PBL can provide formative feedback, detailed rubrics, and multiple evaluations of content and skills (Heitin, 2012).