Now is the time for project-based learning

Project-based approaches to education have been around for over 100 years, but I believe the time has come for us to fully embrace them. In projects, students work over an extended period, often in an interdisciplinary fashion, for a purpose beyond satisfying a school requirement — to build something, to address a question they have, to solve a real problem, or to address a real need. Now is the time for project-based instruction. Here are three key reasons why:

Studies that examined the effect of project-based approaches on students’ learning have found that students developed knowledge, skills, and improved attitudes about learning. For example, Pedro Hernandez-Ramos and Susan De La Paz found that students who experienced the project-based approach to studying Westward Expansion developed greater content knowledge and reported much higher engagement in learning history than students receiving more traditional instruction.

Positive effects have been found in other domains as well, including civics and government, mathematics, and economics. Project-based instruction is also well-suited to literacy learning, in which research shows that students develop comprehension more quickly and write more effectively when they have real-world purposes and audiences for their work.