What We Know About Technological Support for Project-Based Learning

What We Know About Technological Support for Project-Based Learning

Colleen Kehoe, Mark Guzdial GVU Center & EduTech Institute

College of Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 {colleen, guzdial }@cc.gatech.edu

Jennifer Turns

Center for Human-Machine Systems Research School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332

jennifer@chmsr.isye.gatech.edu

Abstract - This paper describes our experiences in building tools to support project-based learning. We briefly describe our successes and failures in three areas: team management and collaboration, supporting reflection, and providing information in project-based form. Our approach combines insights on learning from cognitive science with an appreciation for the practical challenges raised by focusing on projects in a class. Based on our experiences, we conclude that technology can play an important role in supporting project-based learning.

Much of engineering education focuses on projects used to enhance students’ learning of engineering practice and relevant concepts of science and engineering. Without projects, engineering education can become too focused on abstract concepts without students’ understanding of related concepts and how to apply the concepts [1]. Further, research in cognitive science suggests that learning outside of an applicable situation can lead to brittle or inert knowledge, that is, knowledge that does not get transferred to new problems and new situations [2].

However, we also know that projects are not always the learning experience that we want them to be. Potential problems include:

• Team management and collaboration.

Teams may not work well. Students are notorious for not planning nor coordinating well between one another [3].

Students can use support to help them to collaborate effectively, that is, so that performance and learning is facilitated, not hindered [4].

• Lack of reflection. Students often get caught up in the performance of the task and do not reflect and learn.

Students are amazingly gifted at developing strategies that allow them to complete the task successfully but avoid having to actually learn [5, 6]. It’s necessary to get students to reflect in order to learn from the task [7], or as Dixon puts it, to turn experience into learning [8].

• Getting information in a project-based form. Textbooks may not be the best source of information for a project. Students have difficulties connecting theory (the typical content of a textbook) to problems [9].

Examples are an effective method of providing contextualized information that can be directly re-used [10, 11], but textbooks (and even reference books and most Web sites) provide relatively few detailed examples.

Research at the EduTech Institute at Georgia Tech

and elsewhere has explored solutions to the problems of effective project-based learning. For example, research at the Center for Life-Long Learning and Design

has focused on supporting design education, which is a critical aspect of engineering education. In the following sections, we present work conducted through the EduTech Institute which addresses the three potential problems listed above. Our efforts combine insights on learning from cognitive science while also paying attention to what is needed for successful project process. This combination of supporting learning and doing is critical to successful project-based learning [12, 13].

Supporting Team Management and Collaboration

We have learned a lot about team management and collaboration through a succession of experiments, with a big share of errors and failures [14]. Our biggest challenge has been to create situations that encourage student use on a regular basis.

Recently, we attempted to encourage better team planning through use of a Web-based tool called Team

1

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/edutech

2

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~l3d/

Facilitator. The Team Facilitator prompted students to plan at two levels:

• Individually, students were prompted to identify (a) how well they had performed in the previous week on the project and (b) what they were planning to do over the next week.

• As a group, students were prompted to rate group performance so-far and to identify group plans and strategies (e.g., how they planned to complete the project over the course of the project period).

Students were to complete the prompts by Friday of each week of the project period. The group report, accumulated from the individual and group components, was emailed to the instructor. The instructor gave feedback to the students by Monday morning.

The results of a trial in a Sophomore computer science course were pretty dismal. Students’ plans ranged from (a) a literal textbook definition of what a plan was to (b) dates for milestones with no explanation of strategy. The instructor struggled to explain to the students what an effective plan meant, but the feedback came on a Monday: Three days after the last use of the Team Facilitator, and four days before the students would look at it again. Overall, only the final team report had meaningful content, and those essentially said,

“We’re done,” since students did the whole project at the very last moment.

In our next version of the Team Facilitator, we plan to integrate better feedback mechanisms so that students have some measure of their plan as they write it. Further, we

would like to better integrate planning into their design process, so that planning is not a once-a-week activity.

In our work to encourage collaboration, we have had better luck getting students to communicate meaningfully using computer supports, but not without similar failures in our first attempts.

We have been developing a collaboration tool called CaMILE (Collaborative and Multimedia Interactive Learning Environment) [15, 16]. Our first version of CaMILE was a Macintosh-based tool. CaMILE used procedural facilitation , which is a technique developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter [17] and used effectively in their collaboration tool, CSILE [4]. Procedural facilitation involves prompting students about their role in the collaboration and suggesting useful things to say. However, such prompting was not enough with our students to get effective use. In our first trial in a Mechanical Engineering design class, we found that students only used CaMILE when they were assigned to use it. The content of students’ notes was minimal, e.g., a typical note was “I agree.”

Through surveys and interviews with students, we found that there were several impediments to students’ use of CaMILE. A platform-specific version, while acceptable to the Macintosh-using faculty in the class, was heresy to the students who were intense Windows and Linux users.

Students saw little benefit to the computer supported tool.

As one student put it, “I am teamed up with my best friends.

We take three or four classes a quarter together. Why should I talk with them over the computer?”

Figure 1: A Final Exam Review (as Anchor) Linking to Two CaMILE Threads

The next version of CaMILE was a Web-based tool (still featuring procedural facilitation), with features that particularly supported anchored collaboration [18, 19].

Individual notes in a CaMILE discussion could be linked from a context that students were interested in discussing.

For example, individual problems in a Final Exam Review (the anchor) could be linked to different threads (chains of related notes) in a discussion, such that a single click from the problem took the student to a collaboration space specific to that problem (Figure 1). Comparisons of the same class using newsgroups (unanchored collaboration) versus CaMILE have shown that threads in general are three times longer in CaMILE, and that anchored threads in CaMILE are twenty-five times longer than the average newsgroup thread [19]. In short, giving students something to talk about encourages collaboration.

Supporting Reflection

For over ten years, junior-level Mechanical Engineering students have been writing learning essays to reflect on their design experiences. In these essays, students are asked to

document their observations about the design experience and to articulate what they’ve learned. Although some students produce excellent essays, others don’t know what to write about, how to structure the essay, or why they are writing them.

The Reflective Learner [20] is a Web-based environment that supports students in writing these learning essays. The main support of the system are the scaffolded writing area (Figure 2). Scaffolding is term used in Education research to describe the kind of support provided to a student engaged in learning a process, particularly a design or problem-solving process [2, 21, 22]. Each section of the scaffolding writing area represents a component of the essay and is prefaced with prompts for what should be covered in that component. The student types a portion of the essay into each text area, guided by the prompts. Later, the essay is displayed as a contiguous body for less-structured editing and review. These features are designed to help students think about the structure of the essay, both in terms of the components and how they fit together into the completed essay.

Figure 2: Prompts in the Reflective Learner

In addition to the essay editing workspace, the system includes a library of student essays. The library provides access to essays from students in previous quarters. Current students may choose to publish their essays in the library for future (and current) students, as well. While the prompts and other structures in the Reflective Learner provide an explicit (but academic) answer as to why the essays are important, the ability to publish the essay (i.e. create a public, long- lived artifact) provides students with a more practical answer.

The Reflective Learner has been used for several quarters by students in the Mechanical Engineering class, and the results were extremely positive. The majority of students (20 out of 27) voluntarily used the system, with most using it repeatedly. Some students noted that the scaffolds became less valuable over time as they became comfortable with the format of the essay. This suggests that the scaffolds were performing well—actually decreasing students’ reliance on them over time as good scaffolding should [2].

Providing Information in a Project-Based Form

One reason professors assign projects to their students is to give them practice in applying the concepts they have learned. Experience has shown, however, that even students who can pass the exams cannot always apply the knowledge.

We are currently exploring how case libraries might be used to demonstrate application of course content knowledge [10, 11]. A case library can be an important form of communicating process—describing what others have done and how they have done it. A case library might also introduce concepts in a relevant context, present multiple solutions to the same problem, or provide different perspectives on one problem. Additionally, it might function as library of components which can be reused in the students’ own projects. The most important feature of the case libraries we have developed is that they present the information in a way that is similar to the way we expect it to be used—to solve a specific problem.

STABLE (SmallTalk Apprenticeship-Based Learning Environment) [19, 23] is an example of a case library used to facilitate performance and enhance learning. It is a Web- based library of over a dozen projects exemplifying good object-oriented analysis, design, and programming practice.

Each project is presented as a hierarchy of steps which a student can progress through in order to review the project.

Each step is available at a variety of levels of detail (to allow students to fade the scaffolding to an appropriate level) and is linked to several related resources such as project maps, related concepts, information about the strategy behind the step, and a collaboration space for discussing the project.

We have used STABLE for several quarters in a Sophomore-level Computer Science class on modeling and design. Log files and surveys show that students spend a

large number of hours using STABLE and that they find the information useful. In a comparison of programming projects from students who had access to STABLE and those who didn’t, those who did scored significantly higher. In a similar comparison of certain final exam questions, students using STABLE scored reliably better when asked to improve the design of a program. Although these results are preliminary, they suggest that students are gaining some benefit in design skills from the use of STABLE.

Summary

The lessons described suggest that technology can play an important role in structuring and supporting effective project- based learning. Our experience with CaMILE suggests that an anchored collaboration approach can encourage the kinds of extended discussions which contribute to learning. The Reflective Learner is an example of a tool that is easy enough to use that students voluntarily access it, while it is structuring and prompting their learning. STABLE exemplifies the case library approach to design learning which emphasizes multiple, well-structured cases in order to help students gain perspective and an abstract understanding of design and design skills.

There certainly are more problems that students face in project-based learning, and there is a wide range of activities in project-based learning which can be facilitated with technological support. We advocate an approach based on cognitive theories. CaMILE was strongly influenced by the work of Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter [17, 24], the Reflective Learner was influenced by work on scaffolding [2, 25], and STABLE was influenced by work on case-based reasoning [10]. By drawing on the work on how students learn, while also paying attention to design and engineering process, we improve our chances of helping students learn while also supporting their performance.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to our collaborators Janet Kolodner, Director of the EduTech Institute, Cindy Hmelo, Farrokh Mistree, Janet Allen, David Rosen, David Carlson, and Noel Rappin.

Funding for this work has come from the EduTech Institute through a grant from the Woodruff Foundation, and from National Science Foundation grants RED-9550458 and CDA-9414227.

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