Welcome to "PBL Primer Series", a go-to guide for teachers and educators stepping into the world of Project-Based Learning (PBL). This series is crafted to swiftly bring you up to speed on what PBL is all about and how to adeptly integrate it into your teaching repertoire.
In this inaugural piece of the series, we introduce the fundamental concepts of PBL.
What is Project-Based Learning?
PBL (Project-Based Learning) is a student-centered teaching and learning model that emphasizes hands-on learning through projects. Students explore real, complex problems over a period of time to solve them and present the results in a certain form, thereby building an interdisciplinary system of knowledge and skills that can be applied in the real world. Simply put, PBL is "learning by doing".
PBL is a teaching method that has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years and has been widely used in the field of education. "Project" is a complex concept in the field of science management, which generally refers to the decomposition of a problem to be solved into a series of interrelated tasks in order to achieve a specific goal within a specific period of time, and the cooperation of project teams and the effective organization and use of related resources to create a specific product or provide a service, including material products, ideas, presentations, services and so on. The application of projects to the field of teaching and learning results in Project-Based Learning.
PBL has three distinctive features.
Interdisciplinary - In PBL, students are faced with and have to solve real-world, open-ended problems, while real-world challenges can rarely be completely solved with knowledge or skills from a single discipline field, which makes PBL an inherently interdisciplinary approach to learning. Students are often required to use knowledge and skills of multiple subjects to successfully complete projects when exploring complex problems and constructing solutions.
Strong Applicability - PBL requires more knowledge and skills than memorization and places more emphasis on application. Students begin PBL usually with problem identification, and then gradually develop a solution to the problem in an ongoing inquiry. In this inquiry process, it is not enough to simply know what is going on; students need to apply a variety of knowledge and skills across disciplines in different contexts and think critically at all times during the process.
Student-centered - In PBL, the role of the teacher changes from "content deliverer" in a traditional classroom to a "facilitator". Most of the time, students move independently through the PBL process, while the teacher only provides intellectual or mental support when needed. The teacher's task in PBL is to facilitate students to take ownership and make independent, autonomous decisions regarding the project.
Project-Based Learning VS Problem-Based Learning
A concept similar to Project-Based Learning is called Problem-Based Learning. Both approaches emphasize student-centered learning, and in both cases, students involved usually work in small groups.
Despite many similarities, Project-Based Learning and Problem-Based Learning are not exactly the same approach. The scope of Project-Based Learning is greater than that of Problem-Based Learning, so to speak.
As we have discussed before, Project-Based Learning requires students to identify, investigate and solve problems, and create tangible outputs. Questions are a necessary element of PBL, but PBL not only focuses on the question, but also requires students to go beyond answering the question and present the solution in a tangible way. In Problem-Based Learning, on the other hand, students are confronted with a problem and they go on to form a plausible answer by gathering information, etc., thus accumulating new knowledge, but it is not always the case that students need to create and present their works. All problem-based learning approaches use the problem as the driver, but may focus on the solution to varying degrees, so Problem-Based Learning is often limited to the academic domain. We can think about the structure of an academic paper, which usually starts with defining the problem, then formulates a hypothesis, conducts research, and draws a conclusion, and may end at the conclusion, which may or may not have a solution.
Therefore, in terms of problem-solving relevance, Project-Based Learning is greater than Problem-Based Learning.
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