Giving Compass' Take:

• A project-based learning curriculum in Waterford, Michigan was successful in showing that PBL curriculum helps advance students academically. 

• What are the other known benefits of project-based learning?

• Read about other success stories with project-based learning. 

When a classroom of second graders in Waterford, Mich., studied civics in the fall of 2016, they began by exploring a nearby park in Pontiac. Arriving with their notebooks, the seven-year-olds jotted down safety problems. Back in the classroom, they discussed their ideas for improvement.   They created multicolored posters to explain what different departments of local government do, from sanitation to human resources. The kids drafted proposals to clean up messy areas and put soft woodchips under the swings.

It was an effective demonstration of project-based learning, a trend whose roots date back to John Dewey’s educational philosophies and has been spreading through schools across the country over the past five years. The curriculum was recently the subject of an experiment involving 684 students to see if this approach actually teaches kids the reading and writing skills and the content they need to succeed in school.

A group of researchers from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University followed students using the same social studies curriculum as the one used in Waterford in 20 high-poverty schools in Michigan.

After a year, the researchers found that the kids whose teachers were randomly assigned to instruct through projects posted higher scores on a social studies test created by the researchers than schoolmates who were instructed as usual. (The researchers controlled for academic differences among the kids at the start of the school year.) The project-based kids also had slightly higher reading scores but their writing scores were no different.

There’s considerable disagreement even among experts over exactly what project-based learning is. It often involves things that good teachers have long been asking of students, such as problem-solving and learning by doing. t’s a lot more involved than tacking on a project to a traditional unit of study by assigning students, for example, to make shoebox dioramas about a book they’ve read.

Read the full article about project-based learning by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report