A Critique of the Power of Project Based Learning

Project Based Learning (PBL) is a constructivist learning tool that helps enhance the acquisition of practical skills needed in the workforce. The intent of this paper was to report on a research study comparing the results of a student-led on-line PBL environment with those of an instructor-led on-line course.

Based on a review of the literature, the authors thought that the PBL environment would enhance the critical thinking skills (CTS) of the students. The authors stress that CTS is one of several important skills for the present and future workplace. However, they do not cleary outline their reasons for focusing on measuring only CTS rather than also measuring changes in other higher-order thinking skills such as problem-solving, decision making or reasoning (Sendag & Odabasi, 2009, p. 132). They also do not fully explain why they chose to measure the effects of PBL in a computer course, which could potentially contain students with higher than average technology skills, rather than in another part of the teacher preparation curriculum.

The paper also does not clearly explain why they designed the experiment in such as way that there was actually very little difference in the two teaching methods. While the control group's on-line course was clearly more teacher-led than the experimental group's course, it also included a lot of interactive on-line collaboration tools which they later theorize could have confounded the results a bit, since collaboration itself has been shown to enhance higher order thinking skills (Wang, 2005).

In spite of this, the authors do in the end demonstrate that the gain in CTS of the experimental (PBL) group was significantly higher than the CTS gains of the control (teacher-led, on-line) group. However, the article loses much of its overall impact due to numerous problems with poor sentence structure, grammatical errors and excessive repetition of key concepts.

Another concern was the age of the references. Only 16% of the cited resources were 5 years old or less and many were almost 20 years old. Two writings of a leading proponent of PBL, David Jonassen, were cited, but they were not his most recent or best writings on this subject (Jonssen, Howland, Marra & Crismond, 2008). It makes one wonder if the authors screened out some of the literature in order to better build their case, thus creating an impression of possible bias.

Finally the conclusion of the article was full of observations from the literature that would have been better cited up front. Placing them in the conclusions only makes it appear that the authors looked for reasons that cognitive knowledge gains were not significantly different between the two groups only after they had finished their study. It may have been better to have found these sources earlier so that their implications could have been taken into account during the experiment planning process. This would have made for a stronger study and a less defensive conclusions section.

Overall, this study was very interesting and the CTS gains impressive. Yet, much more research is needed to tease out the exact mechanisms of the cognitive gains from both groups. The authors do a good job of outlining some of the factors to consider when planning future research studies (Sendag & Odabasi, 2009). I found it difficult to read because of the distracting structural problems, but I was fascinated by the results.

References:

Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. & Crismond, D. (2008), Meaningful Learning with Technology, 3rd Edition, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, Merrill, Prentice Hall.

Sendag, S. & Odabasi, H.F., (2009). Effects of an online problem based learning course on content knowledge acquisition and critical thinking skills, Computers and Education, 53, 132-141

Wang, C.H., (2005), Questioning skills facilitate online synchronous discussions, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 21(4), 303-313