What a coincidence—I was just writing about this topic myself!
I think the challenge is partly that project-based learning (PBL) is under-defined and contextual, partly that it’s time/money/energy/creativity-intensive, and partly that it’s dependent on a pre-existing level of competence, passion and interest in the particular PBL topic.
One way of framing it is that a person has a rich, multifaceted goal:
To build specific projects that matter to them
Example: building particular pieces of lab equipment that they need for an experiment
To become proficient at the synthetic and physical skills
Example: the physical and mental intuitions useful for putting together electronics, mechanical parts, and chemical reactions
To have sufficient analytical proficiency to diagnose problems and be efficient in their design
Example: the formal and informal theory and reasoning skills
If a person like this also is willing and able to throw a significant amount of their time and money at PBL, I think that they’ll tend to see stellar results compared to the traditional trod through a textbook with occasional labs.
I’d be very curious to know if there was any successful research into predicting whether or not a particular PBL effort would succeed or fail. It seems like the same approach that’s been used to evaluate the plausibility of social psychology research might be useful here. Give people a series of descriptions of PBL experiments, and ask them to predict whether or not the experiment would or would not reach significance or have a given effect size. I’d bet that people would be good at making such predictions.
Followup: I scanned the first listed paper from the systematic review. I think the challenge to arranging the prediction tournament I proposed above would be in producing descriptions of the studies.
What a coincidence—I was just writing about this topic myself!
I think the challenge is partly that project-based learning (PBL) is under-defined and contextual, partly that it’s time/money/energy/creativity-intensive, and partly that it’s dependent on a pre-existing level of competence, passion and interest in the particular PBL topic.
One way of framing it is that a person has a rich, multifaceted goal:
To build specific projects that matter to them
Example: building particular pieces of lab equipment that they need for an experiment
To become proficient at the synthetic and physical skills
Example: the physical and mental intuitions useful for putting together electronics, mechanical parts, and chemical reactions
To have sufficient analytical proficiency to diagnose problems and be efficient in their design
Example: the formal and informal theory and reasoning skills
If a person like this also is willing and able to throw a significant amount of their time and money at PBL, I think that they’ll tend to see stellar results compared to the traditional trod through a textbook with occasional labs.
I’d be very curious to know if there was any successful research into predicting whether or not a particular PBL effort would succeed or fail. It seems like the same approach that’s been used to evaluate the plausibility of social psychology research might be useful here. Give people a series of descriptions of PBL experiments, and ask them to predict whether or not the experiment would or would not reach significance or have a given effect size. I’d bet that people would be good at making such predictions.
Followup: I scanned the first listed paper from the systematic review. I think the challenge to arranging the prediction tournament I proposed above would be in producing descriptions of the studies.