Hands-On Learning - Project-Based Strategies For Student Success

As the competition for jobs and opportunities becomes fierce and fast-paced, students have to be equipped with critical thinking, collaboration and problem-solving skills. 

Studies indicates that for students to engage in an active process of constructing their knowledge, they need to have a hands-on, project-based learning, whereby they have to work on real life problems. 

The visual learning strategies makes students more engaged, increases their rates of enrollment and improves their performance. This blog post presents five ideas on how educators can help students learn more actively through project-based approach.

Making Projects Meaningful 

It is often that the project managers come across with the problem of making projects meaningful in order to motivate the employees towards their accomplishment.

For example, rather than simply learning about environmental issues, learners can evaluate the green initiatives in their school and design top proposals for increasing sustainability. 

Moreover, meaningful projects let students have a voice to express themselves at the learning process. It becomes easy to understand that the idea of purpose empowers students since they have ownership of their work.

Promoting Student Choice

It is also important for students to have some level of control over the processes of different projects, as they will be willing to commit themselves more wholly to projects in which they have some say. 

For instance, students picking topics focusing on civil rights movements could decide to choose a certain decade on which they want to base their research paper or their presentation. 

It can be effective to give students choices so that they match the work with the abilities and preferred choice. This intrinsic motivation results in more effective learning than prescribing specific parameters, metrics or procedures to follow.

Scaffolded Supports 

On the same note, while projects are meant to offer challenge to the learners, appropriate strategies must be provided to ensure that the learners meet the projected challenge. 

Ongoing feedback, checklists, templates, and examples of good work minimize frustration. For example, how teachers can support learners, for a project that involves students creating a business, teachers can offer some of the following scaffolding: a proposal template where the project is subdivided into parts. 

As students’ learning becomes more and more efficient, such interventions are slowly faded out as the ultimate goal is to foster independent learning.

Making Collaboration Meaningful 

The narration is clear and highlights that making collaboration meaningful is important in ensuring that results are achieved. project learning is usually a shared process, something that is similar to what the majority of people experience at work nowadays. 

There is a challenge in grouping and personality; the patterns of grouping that teachers ought to adopt should match the skill and the needs of the learners; the teachers should foster positive group dynamics; and finally, there is responsivity to shared accountability. 

Students must be made to bring out their best in the group with restorative practices circles, roles can be assigned according to their strengths and weaknesses. 

Incorporating An Assessment

It is difficult to encapsulate the complexity of learning that they undergo, through well-developed projects, by traditional pen-and-paper tests. Performance tasks, portfolios, concept maps, journals, and self-assessment should be incorporated into the classroom more often than formal assessments. 

These are better equipped us for future jobs, for instance, the ability to apply acquired knowledge in actual business scenarios. For instance, an economics unit where students have formed their own small businesses to run would best be evaluated.

Their business proposals as well as journals where they write out their step-by-step logical thinking in responding to economic challenges, rather than taking an exam which only tests their knowledge of economic terms.

Conclusion

It has been found that hands on, project-based learning can help to increase student interest and achievement in ways that benefit the students in the future as members of the work force and citizens. 

Nevertheless, it may be stated that assignment of a project is not enough to ensure real learning takes place. Teachers need to plan student-learning activities in such a way that the activities relate to a real-world context and where students have choices.

The activities are scaffolded, students are encouraged to think through the problems they are solving, the activities promote effective collaboration among students, and the assessments used are authentic.