Resources for Assessment in Project-Based Learning. Project-based learning (PBL) demands excellent assessment practices to ensure that all learners are supported in the learning process. With good assessment practices, PBL can create a culture of excellence for all students and ensure deeper learning for all. We’ve compiled some of the best resources from Edutopia and the web to support your use of assessment in PBL, including information about strategies, advice on how to address the demands of standardized tests, and summaries of the research. PBL Assessment Foundations 10 Tips for Assessing Project-Based Learning (Edutopia, 2011) This comprehensive guide from Edutopia goes over many best practices for assessment, including authentic products, good feedback, formative assessment, and digital tools.
Teachers can use this as a professional learning tool and primer for PBL Assessment. Back to Top PBL and Formative Assessment Practices PBL and Standardized Tests PBL Assessment Research. Transformation Central - Project-Based Learning. These teacher-developed Project-Based Learning Units are intended as an idea-generation resource, as these units may reflect alignment to outdated standards. Please consider alignment and adjust these units to current standards prior to classroom implementation. Check out our PBL Online Workshops! Archived PBL These units have been archived and will no longer be updated.
Transformation Central does not guarantee the alignment to the TEKS or state assessment. Physics Algebra I Algebra II Biology Chemistry Geometry. High Tech High - Project Based Learning. Seven Successful PBL Projects In March 2005 High Tech High received a $250,000 grant from the California Department of Education to disseminate project-based learning methods to teachers in non-charter public schools. As part of the project, High Tech High teachers have documented successful projects to share with collaborating teachers from local districts and across the HTH network. The current volume presents the fruits of these labors. The aim is simple: to offer practitioners useful, easily adaptable models of real projects.
Read more... This New House How does human habitation affect the environment? Learn more » Millionaire How can an idea be transformed into a product that could make us millions? Learn more » San Diego Field Guide How can we be better environmental stewards of the San Diego Bay? Learn more » Urban Art How do math and science influence artistic expression? Learn more » Vietnam Project learn more » Drug Project learn more » Machines learn more » Wall-to-wall project-based learning: A conversation with biology teacher Kelley Yonce. At the mid-point of the 2008-09 academic year, according to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study, East Wake School of Integrated Technology biology teacher Kathleen (Kelley) Yonce needed to introduce her class of 20 sophomores to deoxyribonucleic acid, a.k.a. DNA. An avowed project-based learning (PBL) teacher who creates 7-8 learning projects, one after another, each lasting between 1½ and 3½ weeks, throughout the school year, she consulted her usual sources of inspiration — Edutopia, the New Schools Project — but nothing struck her fancy.
She considered modifying a project about genetically modified food she’d attempted the previous year but rejected the idea. “The kids didn’t care,” she says. At home on a snow day watching television, Ms. The key to successful project-based teaching, Ms. For the DNA project, she cast her students in the roles of genetic counselors. The “entry document” This item introduces the project and provides the time-line. Ms. The teams Team leaders Ms. Integrated PBL Projects: A Full-Course Meal! In the project-based learning field, we use the metaphor that projects are the "main course, not the dessert" (as coined in an article from the Buck Institute for Education). Projects are intended to create the need-to-know content and skills, and the opportunity for students to learn them in an authentic context. When teachers first design PBL projects, they are often limited. In fact, I recommend that.
Teachers and students must learn to become better PBL practitioners, so limited projects can lead to more ambitious projects. One of the criteria for a more ambitious project is to integrate the disciplines. This can be easy or challenging depending on your context, grade level, and schedule structures. Teachers develop PBL curriculum for the coming year. Photo Credit: Andrew Miller Use a Variety of Planning Strategies I wrote about many of these strategies in a previous blog post.
Larger Part of the Meal Not all integrated projects are equal when it comes to the disciplines. 20 Tips On How To Work With Students Who Have a Hard Time Collaborating. Professional Goal: Dive Into Project-based Learning - Philip Cummings. I love that my school is deeply committed to providing teachers with quality, on-going professional growth and development.
Among the many things we do each year at PDS for professional development, teachers create an individual professional development goals directly related to classroom teaching and learning. Each goal should have practical application and impact in the current year and align with broader institutional goals and philosophies. Having spent a significant amount of time reading and researching about project-based learning, I decided to commit to diving into PBL this year. I can learn a lot from reading, researching, and observing, but I learn best when I dive in and get my feet wet.
The plan I submitted as my goal for this school year is below. Goal: Incorporate PBL Into 6th Grade Reading My professional development goal for this year will be to research and incorporate more project based learning into my 6th grade reading class. Steps to Achieve Goal: Final Product: Getting into the PBL Groove. CELL at UIndy » PBL Resources. Project Based Learning Science – Lesson Plans for PBL. Putting together a PBL science plan can be enormously time consuming without excellent models.
So here are hundreds of free detailed plans for projects for elementary, middle and high school students. The plans are sorted by discipline - astronomy and space, chemistry, engineering and architecture, physics, technology, and earth, life sciences, physical sciences, and... well, "other" for no clear fit. Most of the ones I've listed provide project overviews, guiding questions, procedures and activities, work product descriptions, grading rubrics, and questions for reflection.
The first PBL project I planned many years ago was the creation of a butterfly habitat in the school garden by my 3rd graders. I think the planning took more time than the project, and I didn't have a lot of resources to help guide me. I found far more free PBL resources than I ever anticipated, and more than 300 free science-based PBL projects are listed below. Maine East students build upon geometry lessons. The PBL Academy. CASES Online: Creating Active Student Engagement in the Sciences. What is CASES Online? CASES Online is a collection of inquiry-based lessons to engage K-12 and undergraduate students in exploring the science behind real-world problems.
Through CASES, you can transform your students into motivated investigators, self-directed and life-long learners, critical thinkers and keen problem solvers. Our cases are grounded in Problem-Based Learning (PBL), Investigative Case-Based Learning (ICBL), and related student-centered pedagogies. [more] What's new in CASES Online? Materials for over 350 cases are now posted and we are continually working to publish more.
CASES Online is a proud member of the Science Case Network, which supports science educators, learners, researchers, developers and professional organizations, furthering access and development of the use of cases and PBL in science education. Search CASES Online Search tips: Searching by Keyword alone is best (and is not case-sensitive) since many cases can work across disciplines and grade levels. Project-Based Learning Through a Maker's Lens. The rise of the Maker has been one of the most exciting educational trends of the past few years. A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.
A Maker, re-cast into a classroom, has a name that we all love: a learner. A Maker, just like a true learner, values the process of making as much as the product. In the classroom, the act of Making is an avenue for a teacher to unlock the learning potential of her or his students in a way that represents many of the best practices of educational pedagogy. A Makerspace classroom has the potential to create life-long learners through exciting, real-world projects. Making holds a number of opportunities and challenges for a teacher. Making, especially to educators and administrators unfamiliar with it, can seem to lack the academic rigor needed for a full-fledged place in an educational ecosystem. What Do You Want to Do? Essential Questions.
Criteria for Effective Assessment in Project-Based Learning. One of the greatest potentials for PBL is that it calls for authentic assessment. In a well-designed PBL project, the culminating product is presented publicly for a real audience. PBL is also standards-based pedagogy. Oftentimes when I consult and coach teachers in PBL, they ask about the assessment of standards. With the pressures of high stakes testing and traditional assessments, teachers and administrators need to make sure they accurately design projects that target the standards they need students to know and be able to do.
In addition, teachers need to make sure they are continually assessing throughout a PBL project to ensure their students are getting the content knowledge and skills that they need to complete the project. Below are some criteria to ensure that your PBL project demands that demands high expectations, aligned to standards and assessed properly. When designing, use R.A.F.T. as a way to ensure an Authentic Culminating Product Target Select Power Standards Next Steps. Making Games: The Ultimate Project-Based Learning.
Gamestar Mechanic Part 6 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. As game-based learning increases in popularity, it’s easy to get pigeon-holed into one particular way of thinking about it or one way of employing it. This is true regardless of how teachers feel about gaming in the classroom, whether they’re for or against it. One common objection to game-based learning is that students will sit in front of screens being taught at. Sure, games are interactive, but on some level, don’t they still just replace the sage on the stage with the sage on the screen? Does a joystick really change the nature of pedagogy? In previous posts in this series, I’ve argued that because games involve systems thinking, they contextualize learning.
“Games are just simulators with an internal incentive structure (often dopamine based). However, virtual simulations of hands-on experience are not the same as tangibly engaging with the world. Related. Assessing creativity with critical thinking. Practical PBL: The Ongoing Challenges of Assessment. In recent years, most students in my project-based AP Government classes have indicated, in both class discussions and anonymously on surveys, that they prefer project-based learning to a more traditional classroom experience.
They find PBL more fun and believe that it leads to deeper learning. However, two types of students often resist this model. Students of the first type generally do not enjoy school at all, and are looking for the path of least resistance. Because a PBL classroom is student-centered and calls on students to produce, less-motivated students will find it more difficult to "hide" and be left alone. The second type of student has already been very successful in traditional classrooms and is deterred by the challenges of this new model. These students are often highly motivated by grades, and worry that the project cycles will detract from direct content delivery.
Fair Assessment of Teamwork 1) Individual Skill Areas 2) Role-Based Assessment 3) "Weighted" Scoring. MakingLearningVisibleResources - home. Free Resources and Tools for "Authentic" Assessment. New York's School of the Future shares their assessment plans and rubrics, classroom projects, schedules, web links, and other resources to help you implement "authentic" assessment today. The current faculty and administrators have worked closely on a host of innovations in assessment and curriculum planning over several years.
The keys, they say, are trust, transparency, and collaboration -- and providing the professional development and training teachers need to succeed. Credit: Tom LeGoff Note: The School of the Future is part of a network of New York schools that develops and uses its own assessment techniques, referred to as DYOs. The school also uses Tasks on Demand, or unannounced assessments that do not provide supports for the students, in order to measure their learning at regular intervals. Ideas for moving curriculum into a circular pattern and tracking performance to expose students to a wide variety of topics over and over again as the material gets more challenging. Project Based Learning Ideas, Lesson Plans, Examples, Templates. Comprehensive Assessment: A New York City Success Story. PBL and Standardized Tests? It Can Work! It's never too late to address this subject. Yes, many of us are gearing down from (or gearing up for) the epic standardized testing season, enjoying the freedom, released from the many pressures that come with the tests.
However, these tests will keep happening. Whether a yearly course assessment, a six-week benchmark exam or a state-level competency test, teachers and students are inundated with testing. Because of the way that testing permeates education culture, I often hear some "pushback" from teachers about their implementation of PBL. Here are some tips and responses to pushback related to PBL and standardized tests. PARCC and Smarter Balanced Although some states have opted out of the PARCC or Smarter Balanced Assessments, many of our students will be taking them -- or something similar to them. Don't Wait Until After Testing Season "I'll wait til after the testing season," is one I hear often.
Power Standards and Learning Targets Embed Test Stems and Questions in the PBL Project.
The Ultimate Education Reform: Messy Learning & Problem Solving. Have you ever gone to the doctor with a rather vague problem? The kind of problem that has no obvious solution? “Doctor, my elbow hurts.” “Doctor, I have a runny nose.” “Doctor, look at this rash.” From that ambiguity, we expect our physicians to narrow down something that could have a thousand origins to the one specific cause, then make it all better with one specific treatment.
It is not just physicians that we expect to have uber-problem solving skills either. Many of the people we run into in life are asked by us to solve our hazy dilemmas. We tell the mechanic: “My car is making a funny noise, can you fix it?” A quarterback asks: “What’s the best play to run, coach?” We might ask a decorator: “I need help redoing this room. We might ask friends: “What do you think is the best car for me to buy?” Some of our ambiguous problems are mundane: “What toothpaste should I use?” So what’s this got to do with school? Problems like these are not like problems we give our students to solve. What You Need to Be an Innovative Educator. Dispelling some misunderstandings about PBL. What Project-Based Learning Is — and What It Isn’t. How to Foster Collaboration and Team Spirit. Project-Based Learning Professional Development Guide.
Tips for Using Project-Based Learning to Teach Math Standards. PBLU.org | Making Projects Click. Project Based Learning | BIE. 8 Essentials for Project-Based Learning | FreeBIEs | Tools. The 8 Elements of PBL: A Model Project | The Nine Steps of Project-Based Learning. Project Design Rubric | FreeBIEs | Tools.