Chapter 2: Overview of IT-assisted PBL

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Moursund, D.G. (1999). Project-based learning using information technology (Selected Chapters) Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

The materials that follow are from a next-to-final version of the above named book.

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Moursund, D.G. (1999). Project-based learning using information technology (Selected Chapters) Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

The materials that follow are from a next-to-final version of the above named book.

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction and a PBL Example

Chapter 2: Overview of IT-assisted PBL

Chapter 3: Some PBL Lesson Topic Ideas

Chapter 4: The Case for PBL

Chapter 7: Assessment in IT-assisted PBL

Appendix C: Overview of Problem Solving

References and Resources

 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.

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:

1. Is learner centered and intrinsically motivating.
2. Encourages collaboration and cooperative learning.
3. Allows students to make incremental and continual improvement in their product, presentation, or performance.
4. Is designed so that students are actively engaged in "doing" things rather then in "learning about" something.
5. Requires students to produce a product, presentation, or performance.
6. Is challenging; focusing on higher-order skills.

Each of these six ideas is briefly discussed in the six sections that follow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. Has authentic content and purpose.
2. Uses authentic assessment.
3. Is teacher facilitated--but the teacher is much more of a "guide on the side" rather than a "sage on the stage."
4. Has explicit educational goals.
5. Is rooted in constructivism. (A social learning theory.)
6. Is designed so that the teacher will be a learner.

Each of these six ideas is briefly discussed in the six sections that follow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Activities

1. 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?
2. 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?
3. 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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