The Future of Education — Project Based Learning
In a previous article, I discussed why the primary assessment model in modern education is entirely backwards. The foundation of schools is built around maximising test scores at the expense of creativity and first-principles understanding. Exams and grades are the substance that fuels modern education; teachers primary incentive is to ensure his/her class gets good grades, and students primary goal is to maximise their marks.
Don’t get me wrong; assessment is a critical part of education. Employers need a way to sort through thousands of applications and find some metric to compare candidates. Students need to know how well they understand the content, and teachers need to know how well they are teaching and how receptive their class is to the content.
However, the current assessment system is far too focused on exams and tests, whereas I think assessment should be far more focused on projects and building a portfolio of work.
Project-Based Assessment
I am so bullish on project-based assessment due to my first-hand experience starting an app during university. I was quite frustrated with university computer science in that I was working really hard to get good marks; however, I felt as if the content would come in one ear and out the other as soon as I wrote the exam. I was learning, intending to get a good mark; I was not learning with the goal of learning!
I also knew a lot about complex computer science theory; I learned a lot about many different topics; however, I had no idea how these ideas connected to one another and how to put all the pieces together to actually create something useful!
However, when I started developing my own app outside of university time, all of the pieces started to come together. Even the small pieces of information I was taught in my CS degree that I previously thought was useless had weight and significance.
Instead of just worrying about the content that would be in the exam, I become fascinated by even the smallest nuance of a particular topic because it would affect my project, which I cared for as much as my grades. I became a self-driven learner, consuming hours of new content a day to build new features and make my app perform faster.
I was consuming orders of magnitude more content than my university degree was teaching; despite this, I remembered and retained it far better. That is because I could see how every piece of information had a purpose, and I had to understand it from first principles to incorporate it into my app.
I learned more in two months of building my first app than what three years of my engineering degree taught me.
Project-based assesment has a variety of benefits over exams, each of which deserve an article on their own however here at the major ones.
- Motivation: Students can choose meaningful topics, giving them autonomy over what they want to work towards ensures they actually care about the topic and, consequently, they remember what they learn far better.
- Relevant to the real world, no one will ever need to write an exam as a real-world task; creating a project and collaborating with a team towards a goal is the day to day work students are actually likely to do when they leave education.
- Teaches teamwork and leadership; writing an exam as a solo sport whereas project-based assessment can involve multiple fellow students, forcing the students to learn how to work in a team to accomplish a particular goal.
- Creativity; in an exam, there is only one correct answer; however, this is never the case in the real world; there are a variety of potential solutions and limitless ways to achieve these solutions. Projects enable students to express their creativity to solve a problem and enables them to focus on what they enjoy and are good at.
Limitations
Projects are far more effective of a tool for students to learn. However, they are a far more challenging of a tool for employers and schools to use. Suppose you want to evaluate a pool of 1000 candidates for a job quickly. In that case, you can’t wait for them to all finish a project and then tediously go through and grade each on. A far easier and more cost-effective way of determining who is most likely to be the best candidate is to give them a standardised test, which a computer can objectively and automatically mark.
It is also just far more comfortable for a teacher to grade 100 papers with a memo by her side than creatively come up with a project and then spend hours understanding different students projects on entirely different topics and providing customised feedback.
Conclusion
From a student’s perspective, projects are, without question, a more effective and meaningful way to learn. However, from an institutional perspective, tests and exams are the most cost-effective and efficient way of motivating students and determining competency in a particular field.
I do not know the answer to this challenge; more thinking and experimentation needs to be done to find the right balance. However, there is certainly scope within the current system for more project-based assessment to be introduced into formal education.
This post is part of a 30-day writing challenge I am doing. Every day for 30 days, I am posting an article of at least 500 words. If you notice that I miss a day, I will buy you lunch.
