PBL- Project Based Learning

Project based Learning (PBL) offers many opportunities to the students to learn Creativity, Communication, Collaboration and Critical thinking (4 Cs). Moreover, PBL offers a great opportunity to learn the metacognitive skills too. This small article is about highlighting this very aspect of PBL.

Metacognitive skills involve being aware of one's thinking, learning strategies, and problem-solving approaches, and then making deliberate efforts to enhance and optimize these processes. Metacognition allows individuals to reflect on their learning strategies and make adjustments to improve their learning outcomes.

In a Project, many things are undefined in detail – either intentionally or unintentionally. Students have to start their project with a few assumptions and build a strategy based on what the project outcomes should be. ?The students will discover multiple ways of solving the problem. They may dump earlier strategy or revise it as they start understanding more about how to solve the problem.

The team of the students will often face issue with their internal dynamics, which is expected. They will have to find their team's strengths and weaknesses.

They may face challenges which could be technical in nature or may be related to funds or resources available with them, for example, the resources may be of lower capacity than what they actually want.

As the students discover new problems in their pathway, each time they will have to device a solution by either solving with the help of a mentor or by themselves.

The students may run out of allocated time and in anticipating the same, they may have to re-adjust their strategy, their goals and they may have to compromise some of the desired level of finish.

The students may learn how to communicate effectively, write documents, create charts, maintain decorum, learn to be a team player by making sure that other team members are informed all the time.

At the end of the project students will feel proud of themselves, they will get a sense of achievement. And if they were too much off the outcomes, they will feel nervousness too.

But when the PBL is evaluated, do we assess the above situations? If you look at the rubrics of Project Based Learning evaluation, you will find that most of these rubrics focus on direct learning such as Problem statement, Tools and techniques used, documentation, Results and reports. Such rubrics fail to capture many indirect learning that happens in a project, such as metacognitive skills which are equally important – in fact I would say that more important than the final outcome of the project.

In my humble opinion, the PBL evaluation rubric should address self-reflection, self-directed learning, team collaboration, and situations such as how did they overcome the challenges, how did they overcome the road-blocks, what did the anticipate to be the level of quality of the project and what could they achieve, how did they estimate the time and efforts, how and why did they identify who was the right team member for a certain tasks, how well they used the resources, how did they overcome the challenges of team dynamics, and how did they improve the communication amongst themselves.

Furthermore, some of the following aspects should be part of their project submission, and reporting – what were their unexpected successes or positive outcomes, how did the PBL contribute to their personal growth and professional growth, what insights they gained, which could be useful for the future projects and what changes their attitude will they like to carry out on their next PBL, etc. And these reflections should also be evaluated and covered in the rubric.

Such self-reflection will help the students know more about themselves which is nothing but the self-evaluation. They can learn from their peers a lot when they read the others' self-reflections, which could give them new insights.

Teachers or the mentor of the students on the project cannot be all the time supervising the students and hence collecting the information about what happened during the whole project is a way to know more about how individuals learned thru the experience of PBL assignment. The success of the PBL is not just limited to achieving defined outcome of the project… a lot happens during the project which is equally or more important than the actual project outcomes, which also should be evaluated and given importance. Isn’t it?

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