How Project Based Learning Can Influence Students’ Performance
Project Based Learning, or PBL, is an instructional approach built upon learning activities and real tasks that have brought challenges for students to solve. These activities generally reflect the types of learning and work people do in the everyday world outside the classroom. PBL is generally done by groups of students working together toward a common goal PBL teaches students not just content, but also important skills in ways students have to be able to function like adults in our society.
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These skills include communication and presentation skills, organization and time management skills, research and inquiry skills, self-assessment and reflection skills, group participation and leadership skills, and critical thinking. Performance is assessed on an individual basis, and takes into account the quality of the product produced, the depth of content understanding demonstrated, and the contributions made to the ongoing process of project realization. PBL allows students to reflect upon their own ideas and opinions, and make decisions that affect project outcomes and the learning process in general. The final product results in high quality, authentic products and presentations.
PROJECT BASED LEARNING
The concept of Project-Based Learning (PBL) is not new, but it has recently gained the spot light in education field. In the past decade, studies on PBL have increasingly been conducted and adopted across a diversity of educational institutions worldwide. Researchers have given a variety of definitions for PBL in which they all share several similar disciplines. In terms of its crucial functions, stated that PBL is an instructional approach which is built upon learning activities and real tasks that have brought challenges for students to solve. PBL can be seen as a student-driven (student-centred) approach to learning in which students are required to take part in a real project by developing a question or inquiry and under the supervision of teachers in order to create a project to share with the select audience. In other words, students involve designing their own inquiries, planning their learning, organizing their research, implementing a multitude of learning strategies, and evaluating their projects that have realworld applications beyond the classroom. These activities give students the opportunity to work relatively autonomously over extended periods of time; and culminate in realistic products or presentations. When it comes to the teachers‘ role. Students work together under the teachers‘ supervision in which they oversee each of the process and approve each choice before the students embarks in a direction, toward a common goal. In short, PBL has originally developed from the root of constructivism theory in which learning is considered as a mental construction; that is, students learn by constructing new ideas or concepts based on their current or prior knowledge. This approach empowers learners to pursue content knowledge on their own, demonstrate their new understandings through a variety of presentation modes, and gain valuable skills that will build a strong foundation for their future in the global economy.
EFFECTIVENESS OF PBL
Incorporating projects into curriculum is neither new nor revolutionary; however, its benefits are inevitable in the process of teaching and learning. A teacher in Washington State who has used project-based instruction in his math and science classes reported that many students find meaning and justification for learning by working on project after a long period struggling in most academic settings. He also stated that by facilitating learning of content knowledge as well as reasoning and problem-solving abilities, project-based learning can help learners to prepare for state assessments and meet state standards. The engagement and motivation from PBL lead to high achievement. PBL provides one way to introduce a wider range of learning opportunities into classroom.
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
The effectiveness of PBL in academic has been proved by many studies. Especially, PBL has improve students‘ test scores significantly on standardize tests of academic achievement in many schools and levels. Three elementary schools implemented PBL program in Dubuque, and after two years, two of these schools showed gains in the Iowa Test of Basic Skills from well below average‖ to the district average; the third school showed a gain equivalent from “well below average” to “well above the district average. Similarly, these improvement scores occurred at a time when the percentage of limited English speaking students increased in a middle school from 6% to 22%, and these gains did not level out but increased an average of 25 additional points the following year.
PROJECT BASED LEARNING AND STUDENTS PERFORMANCE
PBL learning has been studied extensively and a number of papers have discussed the merits of implementing PBL in educational environments, greater emphasis should be given on how it can be adapted to teach language effectively in secondary education. Fifteen sixth grade students and two primary teachers participated in the study with the aims at implementing project work in order to make students aware of the history of the area in which they live, and use it as a mechanism for cross curricular, and interdisciplinary work, as well as to make use of new technologies. The study emphasized on the benefits of the project work on cognitive, emotional and psychomotor aims by most students. More specifically, in relation to language skills, most learner’s willingness to participate in learning activities increased. At the end of the school term, most students showed an improvement in all four language skills. Their speaking and listening skills, in particular, had the greatest improvement. In addition, students gathered a wealth of information about local history from a variety of sources (books, interviews, and the internet), learned a lot about local history, and gained in depth understanding of issues related to local history.
