Project-Based Learning in the First Year

Beyond All Expectations

Kristin K. Wobbe, Elisabeth A. Stoddard

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781620366899
• eBook ISBN: 9781620366912
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Published in association with This book has two goals: First, to show the value of significant project-based work for first-year undergraduate students; and Second, to share how to introduce this work into first year programs. The authors spend the bulk of the book sharing what they have learned about this practice, including details about the administrative support and logistics required. They have also included sample syllabi, assignments and assessments, and classroom activities.The projects are applicable in a liberal arts education, in engineering programs, in two and four year colleges, in public and private universities--any institution with first year undergraduate students that wants to actively engage them in understanding and solving real-world problems through project work. Evidence shows that project-based learning, with real world, team-based educational experiences, increases the engagement and retention rate of underserved students. Introducing project-based learning in the first year can set the stage for incorporating the culture and practice of inclusive excellence as foundation for learning on college and university campuses.

PART ONE

MAKING THE CASE FOR PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IN THE FIRST YEAR

In part one, we set the stage by explaining the benefits of having students start their college career with project-based learning (PBL). We provide evidence of the value of using authentic projects early in the college experience rather than waiting until students are seniors before asking them to take on significant project work. The goal of these chapters is to convince you, and decision makers, that embarking on PBL in the first year is not only possible but also incredibly valuable. We provide guidance on mind-set and resources that make PBL an effective approach.

Chapter 1, “An Introduction to Project-Based Learning in the First Year,” provides a broad overview of the rationale, benefits, and challenges of embarking on PBL. Grounded in the literature of teaching and learning, Boudreau and Wobbe make the case for the value of incorporating PBL in general, and our decade-plus experience is used to highlight the particular advantages to doing it in the first year.

As real-world projects rarely fit neatly within disciplinary boundaries, chapter 2, “The Value of a Transdisciplinary Approach,” focuses on the challenges and benefits of project-based courses that transcend a single discipline. Boudreau and Rosbach provide rich examples to make a case for expanding beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries—to have students see problems through a variety of disciplinary lenses, while never losing sight of the human context of the problem.

Chapter 3, “Institutional Support,” discusses the ways that institutions can and should support initiatives in PBL to best set them up for success. PBL done most effectively is resource intensive, and in a resource-limited environment, justifying the additional needs can be difficult. Rulfs and Wobbe delineate the needs and also provide arguments for them.

Throughout this book we will provide both theoretical and practical guidance for various aspects of using PBL for first-year students. Many chapters end with a section called “Try This,” which contains suggestions to spark your creativity to remodel your activities, assignments, and assessments to incorporate more project-like aspects in a way that works for you. Visit our companion website (www.wpi.edu/+firstyearprojects) for examples of student project work.

1

AN INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IN THE FIRST YEAR

Kristin Boudreau and Kristin Wobbe

Projects as vehicles for student-centered learning have a rich history in higher education, with considerable evidence demonstrating their value (Skorton & Bear, 2018; Thomas, 2000). The primary use of projects in higher education has been as a culminating, or capstone, activity where students demonstrate their mastery of knowledge and skills developed earlier. Our objective, on the other hand, is to convince you that projects, in particular interdisciplinary projects, can be just as valuable in the first year and provide a wealth of advantages to students who participate in them, including a richer, more intentional college experience; the development of important professional skills like communication and emotional intelligence; early opportunities for internships and more professional-level summer work; motivation for subsequent course work; and the building of both confidence and academic community.

The chapters in this book derive from our 11 years of experience teaching the Great Problems Seminars (GPS) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), whose 47-year curriculum centers on project-based learning, which we will refer to here as PBL. The GPS is an interdisciplinary, project-based, first-year course cotaught by two faculty from different disciplines. We introduced this course after recognizing that WPI’s first-year curriculum did not match the ambitions of the other 3 years and that our students missed the challenge of diving into PBL from their first weeks of college.

PBL can be hard emotionally, as well as intellectually and logistically. While some students will decide that PBL is not for them, others will develop the character traits that educational researchers know to be essential to academic, professional, and personal success. These traits include persistence through failure (grit), optimism, curiosity, gratitude, conscientiousness, and self-control (Bain, 2012; Duckworth, 2016; Tough, 2012). They are hard to develop in traditional courses, where faculty rarely address the emotional and psychological challenges of academic work. We have learned to confront these challenges openly and discuss them with our PBL students, because otherwise they will perhaps not recognize that ambiguity, unanswered (if not unanswerable) questions, and complexity are part of PBL and will help them develop into successful leaders and people. Of course, being honest about the challenges of teaching and the limits of a professor’s expertise leaves faculty vulnerable in front of their students in a way that older models of collegiate pedagogy would find risky. And yet, the payoffs of doing this work can be profound.

As an important and extensive 2014 research study (Gallup–Purdue, 2014) revealed, a college graduate’s overall sense of well-being and workplace engagement (the depth of involvement, enthusiasm, and commitment to one’s work) greatly depends on two factors from the undergraduate experience: first, if they recall having had a professor—even just one—who cared about them personally, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their hopes and dreams, and second, if they took up a research project that extended for at least one semester. Better yet is if they’d had some experience that allowed them to apply what they had learned in some practical way—in an internship or job or, as in the experiences of our GPS students, in a project that allowed them to use what they’d learned to help a sponsor or a specific community. And yet, only 3% of the college graduates surveyed reported that they had both experiences as undergraduates.

Education through project work can be difficult for faculty and students; however, benefits accrue also to the faculty who take on the challenge of project-based teaching. Faculty who participate have said, “I had more fun teaching [in this course] than I have had in years” and characterized the experience as rewarding and worthwhile. One even exclaimed, “It was fun. I loved working with these kids, and they were open and had crazy ideas, and they had dumb ideas and good ideas and I got to watch them grow and . . . they do a really good job.”

Drawing on the examples of the more than 2,300 first-year students we have taught over more than 10 years teaching PBL to first-year students, we offer here some guidance on how you might develop your own first-year courses to include meaningful projects that will make a positive and long-term difference for your students. Although we include the research behind our claims, particularly in this first chapter as we make the case for the value of PBL and what perceived needs inspired PBL, we have chosen throughout this book to highlight our practice rather than the theory behind it: stories, examples, and materials to help you imagine how you might develop your own project-based courses or assignments. Our examples and anecdotes are taken from our own experiences as teachers and coteachers in a variety of courses, our conversations with each other as coteachers and during our annual weeklong faculty retreats for GPS teachers, in our experiences teaching in WPI’s annual Institute on Project-Based Learning, and in our research and faculty development within the community of PBL teachers and researchers. Our goal is to inspire you and help you adopt PBL interventions, small or large. If you have never taught using projects before, try something small at first; you can always extend a project later. Chapter 4 has suggestions for reenvisioning the role of faculty as they venture into project-based learning.

We begin in this chapter by addressing the question of why an institution or faculty should invest in PBL. It’s hard, it’s time-consuming, and one cannot simply reuse lectures that have worked well in the past. PBL is dynamic, with the approach and often the content changing according to the students, their interests, their capacities, and their difficulties, as well as according to your local context. This chapter and the chapters that follow will begin by considering the question of “why,” then move to explain “how” with challenges and benefits identified: approaches and examples that have worked for us and can be adopted and adapted by others. Above all, PBL should be conscious of its context and its participants and adjustable to those variables.

Why Use Projects in the First Year? To Motivate Students!

Educators understand the importance of motivation to student persistence and success: Only a student who cares about learning is likely to learn. However, not all highly motivated students are driven by the same aims, and the varieties of motivation can make a big difference in how well students learn. Some students are motivated simply to pass the course. Others want to perform extremely well and care most about grades; parental or instructor approval; or the award, internship, or job that might result from high performance in a course or a subject. These are all examples of extrinsic motivation, learning driven by the belief that success in the class will lead to some other goal. Extrinsic motivation often results in what Derek Bruff called “surface” or “strategic” learning—learning that, because it is valuable only to reach some other goal, is soon forgotten (Bruff, 2011). On the other hand, an intrinsically motivated student, driven by the desire to master a subject without much thought about grades or other rewards, is much more likely to learn the subject deeply rather than strategically, to be able to apply what has been learned to different contexts, to recall and use this learning after the course has ended, and to persist through difficulties (Bain, 2012; Bass & Elmendorf, n.d.; Lang, 2013).

The animating question behind this book: How do we move first-year students to this more rewarding kind of motivation? Drawing on our experiences teaching PBL to first-year college students, we hope to help you design and deliver your own PBL courses or activities for new college students. As you will see, well-constructed PBL experiences include many of the experiences that George Kuh and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) identify as “high-impact practices” because they contribute to enhanced student engagement, learning, and retention (Kuh, 2008). These practices can be life changing for students from many different backgrounds. And there is good news for those of you hoping to include them in your first-year courses: They can take many different forms, depending on your priorities and those of your institution. High-impact practices have these factors in common: They demand considerable time and effort from students (and, we must acknowledge, often also from faculty), they facilitate learning outside the classroom, they require meaningful interactions with faculty and other students, they encourage collaboration, and they provide substantive and frequent feedback.

To understand how these different practices support intrinsic motivation and student engagement, it is helpful to survey some of the groundbreaking research in educational psychology. The behaviorist theory of motivation holds that rewards (money, prizes) can effectively induce people to study and learn. However, Edward Deci and his collaborators have discovered that these incentives can actually destroy a person’s motivation to work hard on a challenging and engaging project that leads to learning. Instead, they argued that basic human emotional needs are much more effective motivators. In their classic work on motivation, Deci and Flaste (1995, p. 71) identified the perceptions of both competence and autonomy as powerful motivators: “The strivings for competence and autonomy together—propelled by curiosity and interests—are . . . complementary growth forces that lead people to become increasingly accomplished and to go on learning throughout their lifetimes.” Ryan and Deci (2000) later added a third human need, that of relatedness or personal connection. Finally, Derek Bruff (2011) added a fourth element, purpose. Camille Farrington and colleagues’ 2012 research on adolescent learning supports these findings and affirms what people familiar with PBL have discovered about the process of learning with open-ended, challenging projects. In a conversation with Tough (2016), Farrington noted that moments of failure are the times when students are most susceptible to messages of encouragement from their teachers. Farrington argued that “academic perseverance” can be supported by a student mind-set consisting of four key beliefs (which correspond to the four principles of education): “I belong in this academic community,” “My ability and competence grow with my effort,” “I can succeed at this,” and “This work has value for me” (cited in Tough, 2016, pp. 74–79).

The theorists of education who resonate the most with us begin with the axiom that everyone has the desire to be competent, autonomous, and related to others and to live for some purpose. The lesson for teachers is that if we give our students assignments that they believe can help them meet these four elemental human needs—for competence, autonomy, relatedness, and purpose—they will be much more likely to work hard in our courses, will be more engaged in the process, and will remember and be able to apply what they have learned throughout their lives. Teachers can leverage these four principles of education to enhance a student’s intrinsic motivation. We will discuss each principle in turn, suggesting ways that you can put these theoretical discoveries to use in your first-year courses and illustrating the pedagogical theory with a represen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Do Project-Based Learning—Save the World
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Little Bit of History: The Worcester Polytechnic Institute Plan and the Great Problems Seminars
• Part One: Making the Case for Project-Based Learning in the First Year
• Part Two: Preparing for Project-Based Learning
• Part Three: Making Project-Based Learning Work in the Classroom
• References
• Contributors
• Index
• Also available from Stylus
• Backcover