1.3
Evaluation of project-based learning
Lifelong learning has increasing importance in the 21st century, as the acquired
professional knowledge is about to expire within ten years. The old school model of
passively learning facts is no longer sufficient to prepare students to survive in
today's world. Project-Based Learning makes learners as an active participant in the
process of learning and helps them to learn skills which are mandatory in the 21st
century. In short, we can say that "Project-Based Learning integrates knowing and
acting"
6
. Project-Based Learning is an instructional approach designed to give
students the opportunity to develop knowledge and skills through engaging projects
set around challenges and problems they may face in the real world. The topic,
planning and organizing the session, dealing with the topic, creating and presenting
the results of the work are based on the students' true independence. The role of
teachers is to help this autonomy (facilitator, supervisor). The working method of
project education is primarily cooperative teamwork, but it is important to give way
to individualized work as well. There are many benefits of Project-Based Learning.
It helps bring the school’s theoretical curriculum closer to real life, thereby
motivating students. Project-Based Learning allows students to learn by doing and
applying ideas. Students engage in real world activities that are like the activities
that adult professionals engage in. Students gain a deeper understanding of the
material when they actively construct their understanding by working with and using
ideas. Using PBL has a positive effect not only on student performance but also in
relation to learning. By using it, students are more responsible, aware of the work,
more independent in their work. It helps to develop competencies that remain in the
background during traditional education, but we will need it very much in life.
Examples are teamwork, cooperation skills, and explanatory skills. In addition, it
helps students develop self-regulatory learning. It improves the ability to adapt to
change, the ability to solve problems in unknown situations, and the reasoned
6
Ribé, R., Vidal, N. Project work: Step by step. Oxford: Heinemann. 1993. 18 p
18
justification of decisions made. It has a developing effect on the ability to think
critically and creatively, as well as on the ability to accept and evaluate other people's
ideas and views, i.e., the ability to empathize. As a result of the PBL method,
students take more universal and holistic approaches, improve team collaboration,
and work together to learn about their own strengths and weaknesses, resulting in
improved self-regulatory learning. Researches have demonstrated that students, who
learn in Project-Based Learning, get higher scores than students in traditional
education. Further research has also found that attitudes towards learning have been
positive and that there has been a positive change in other non-cognitive personality
traits. In addition to the many benefits of project education, there are also many
difficulties. Solving a project takes much more time than if the teacher simply shared
that knowledge. It requires more time and energy from both the teacher and the
student. Solving a project often does not only improve the knowledge of one subject,
so the problem arises as to which class to deal with. A solution could be to introduce
project days where subjects could be taught in an integrated way. More and more
schools are taking initiatives to do this; however, these are usually a few separate
days a year. And for a real task, independent work at home would also be important,
which cannot be solved in a project day. The solution to this could be to introduce
project lessons instead of project days. Another difficulty with applying Project-
Based Learning is that the working method is most often teamwork. This raises
several issues. For example, it would be important for all students in the group to be
equally active in solving the task. However, usually after a while, the roles develop
in the groups, and many times a student gets to the periphery without being given a
task. The situation of teachers in teamwork is also difficult. Each class has 20-30
people, while the upper limit of a well-functioning group is much lower, so a teacher
will be the tutor of several groups at the same time, which is a much more difficult
task than holding a frontal lesson. Perhaps one of the biggest difficulties in Project-
Based Learning is the issue of evaluation. What, when and how to evaluate, and how
to evaluate individuals in a teamwork. While there are many articles on PBL and its
benefits, there are much fewer on evaluating Project-Based Learning. I think many
19
teachers would like to use PBL, only because of the difficulty of assessment, they
prefer a different method.
Evaluation of the project task. In pedagogy, assessment is always a comparison.
The question is, who, whom does it compare to. The teacher refers to the external
(curriculum) requirements, the other students, the student's previous performance,
his own open or sometimes hidden expectations, and often to international
expectations. The student is mainly concerned with the open and by "caught" hidden
expectations of the teacher and his peers. Teachers do not usually know the external
requirements, they can appreciate their own development especially at high jumps,
but also need external help for this. Parents' benchmarks are scattered across a wide
range of areas: what other student does, what grades does others, what kind of further
education want to do he / she have with his / her child, or perhaps where his other
child did hold in this age. Project-Based Learning, also called challenge-based
learning, begins with the assumption that there is not necessarily just one right
answer to solving a problem. Finding creative solutions is important but very
difficult to evaluate. If projects are interdisciplinary, it becomes even more
challenging for teachers to criticize topics that may be unknown to them.
7
If we consider the evaluation as a feedback about the progress or achievement of the
student, it can take many different forms and may be formal or informal, if necessary
A very important question in the evaluation is what to evaluate. The end
product is important, but if you focus only on this, the meaningful learning that
happens throughout the process can be lost. The advantage of PBL is that students
learn much more than content. They learn how to work with others, solve problems,
present ideas to the audience, and learn from their mistakes. So in the evaluation, we
are not only curious about what they have learned, but how they came to learn it so
that they can use these processes in the future. Some areas of assessment include
content acquisition, collaboration or participation, as well as presentation or style.
7
Ribé, R., Vidal, N. Project work: Step by step. Oxford: Heinemann. 1993. 22 p
20
Additional considerations may include adherence to deadlines or other elements
related to the topic or project.
In traditional education, assessment is seen as the end of the learning process often
only once at the end of the learning process. However, the assessment has much
more potential. Applying it appropriately, students can be encouraged to succeed.
That is why it is very important that the evaluation should appear from the beginning
and be present throughout the learning process. We can do this by clearly setting out
the expectations of the result in the objective. Feedback and corrections should be
frequent so that students can continuously improve their work and produce a
successful end product. Waiting for feedback for too long may result in work that is
too far from the desired goal and their corrections would require over-energy.
Results of project work. We think rarely that the fate of the final products is a
valuation element as well. The end goal can be a pageant, a poster, a mock-up that
goes to the wall of the corridor, which gets out to the director's office, the library,
the mall, the domestic or foreign sister school. But it can be a reward, what a student
who has worked the most on it can take home. However, the result can be a comic
book or a document that can be published in a newspaper, but it can also be a play
we perform for parents, classmates or a more public audience. An increasingly
fashionable end product is a video or presentation that can be made available to the
Internet after the performance, allowing students to receive a broad range of
feedback.
Dimensions of evaluation. Evaluations have four dimensions: self, peer, teacher and
audience evaluation.
Self-evaluation. Self-evaluation is an especially important piece of the summative
evaluation because it taps into higher level thinking and awareness of the material,
process, and final product. It makes students think about their successes, mistakes,
and goals for the next time. I think it is important that the evaluation always ends
with the filling of written form, which serves the purpose of preventing the student
from avoiding his / her own evaluation and opinion according to the given criteria.
21
Because the goal is to evaluate and thinking on the students honestly, the completed
form will remain with the student so that no one else can look at it.
Peer evaluation. Peer review is always a very important consideration for students,
they want rather meet their friends than adults. Correct assessment of students
contributes to a better collaboration process and increases student responsibility.
During project based learning, peer evaluation is present at several levels: on the one
hand, in-group private assessment, which is a constant accompaniment to the
process, and, on the other, in the final assessment, a public assessment. At the end
of the process, however, there is a great need for an “internal” evaluation session
where the participants in the project discuss in themselves the content and work
organization lessons of the (new type of) work. It is then possible to draw attention
to aspects and techniques of self-study. In many cases, this opportunity also allows
us to open up to the next complex topic in light of the lessons from the project solved.
Aspects that can be used in the internal evaluation include
What did the team-mates like the most and what did they like the least?
What goals have we achieved compared to our common plans?
What experiences did the team-mates have with the different organizational ways?
What problems and conflicts hindered the work, how could they be overcome?
What organizational problems have been encountered, how can they be prevented
at other times?
What kind of school and extracurricular circumstances made it difficult to work?
What kind of school environment changes is absolutely necessary for the next
project?
What external signals did be received on the fly or at the end of the project?
What is the fate of the project results in the short and long term?
Do you want to do project work on other occasions?
All these questions are worth asking and answering in the atmosphere of success and
joy of working successfully.
Audience evaluation. Michael Hernandez's research illustrates the importance of
evaluating an external audience. Hernandez took a group of students to Cuba to make
22
documentaries about the culture and history of the island nation. The main goal was
to learn how to make documentaries. One of the students, who excel from the peer,
publicly posted to YouTube after the project ended and received critical comments
from someone living in Cuba. In his research, Hernandez described that the student
was much more influenced by the comments of unknown (but knowledgeable)
people than by the evaluation of his teachers or classmates.
Public and Private Evaluation. Ideally, PBL is a credible experience, whether in the
classroom or outside the school. Therefore, it should be possible for the feedback
from the public to assess the success rate of the project. Public critiques (such as
comments on blog posts) and class discussions provide a broader perspective and
can carry even more meaning for the student than teacher feedback. Private
evaluations, such as self-reflection and teacher feedback, can treat confidential
information about teammates, allowing students to be honest with their peers and
themselves. It is therefore very important that both types of evaluation play a role in
the process.
Evaluation Techniques. The goal of evaluations should be to emphasize growth and
encourage improvement. It is therefore very important that our criticism is
constructive. Several techniques help us in our oral or written constructive criticism.
The essence of the technique is known as "Critique Sandwich" is to encapsulate our
negative comments about a problem or flaw between positive notes. The point of the
"I like that..." technique is to try to give you feedback that starts with: I like that ...,
I wonder if ..., The best next step might be... The essence of the "Rose / Thorn / Bud"
technique is that our critique should include something good (rose), something bad
(thorn), or a suggestion, a potentially good thing (bud), which may be a good idea
but needs work.
8
Summative evaluation of Project Work. It is very difficult to evaluate
individuals during teamwork. In addition, it would be important for all students in
the group to be equally involved in solving the problem. However, after a while,
8
Lamer, J., Mergendoller, J. R. Seven essentials for Project-Based Learning. EL educational leadership, 2010. p 68
23
roles in groups also form, and in many times, some student gets to the periphery, so
he /she does not get a task. To solve this, a possible idea is to evaluate each teamwork
at the end too, and the group together will receive a total score to be shared between
them. And the scores can be converted to a ticket at the end. (It is a good idea to first
convert more teamwork to one ticket so that the partial scores add up.) If we apply
this method frequently, students will stand up for themselves and become more
involved in the work. Furthermore, let we the peripheral students at least once be in
leadership roles.
| 