Can First Graders Access and Benefit From Project-Based Learning?
Keli Gagen
1. Introduction
What is Project-Based Learning?
Project-Based Learning or PjBL is an inquiry-based learning practice. The students learn concepts, which are complex and cross-disciplinary. In PjBL students should follow certain procedures, then apply that knowledge in a project. This is one way that it is differentiated from PBL, which is also an inquiry-based approach to instruction. (Ferrero et al., 2021) The deliverable can be almost anything. Project artifacts could be posters, infographics, models, or even intangible services or presentations. The problems that students face in PjBL are meant to be realistic. Students apply prior knowledge to complete the project. (Reiser, 2021 p287)
Students need certain skills for project-based learning. They are expected to use prior knowledge in addition to certain skills, as well as fundamentals in primary subjects like basic addition and subtraction and core literacy skills and spelling rules, to help them in their project. In PjBL, teachers provide scaffolds to support student growth. (Ferrero et al., 2021)
Critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, and innovation are among the skills that students need to gain for success in today’s world, and PjBL attempts to prepare students for that. (National Education Association, 2012). According to a report prepared for the NSW Department of Education, “Schooling should be helping to equip young people with the tools they need to become engaged thinkers, resilient and resourceful learners, creative problem solvers and active members of their communities.” (Kim et al., 2019)
High Tech High is a major exporter of project-based learning education. Based in San Diego, California, and backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they have six high schools, five middle schools, and five elementary schools. They also have a graduate school and research center. High Tech started with high schools and subsequently opened middle and elementary schools. (HTH Graduate School of Education – Reimagine Education, 2021).
I hold my California Multiple Subjects Teaching Credential and trained for it at the High Tech High Graduate school of education. I have worked at High Tech High Media Arts as an academic coach with 9th-12th graders. I student-taught 5th grade at High Tech Explorer Elementary and was a one-on-one support aid for a student with Down Syndrome. I was also a long-term sub for High Tech Explorer Elementary in 3rd grade and High Tech Elementary Chula Vista in 5th grade. Finally, I spent two years at High Tech Middle School teaching 7th-grade Humanities.
I worked at High Tech High Media Arts as an academic support coach. All of the schools had roles like this. They have not credentialed teachers, but college graduates who took direction on how to support students from the inclusion specialists and/or the classroom teachers. At the schools, the teachers usually act as the project designers. They are encouraged to design their own projects using backward planning. They are encouraged to think about how they will scaffold for their learners. They are not usually given explicit instructions or a curriculum.
Each school and team has a different culture and norms. Some elementary schools have adopted outside curriculum or programs school-wide for foundational math and literacy. Examples are Lucy Calkins and ST math. The teacher I interviewed did use school-wide curriculum programs, specifically for this example, Lucy Calkins Reading and Writing Project. (Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, 2021)
There were different challenges in project work for every level I worked with. Working at the high school and middle school level, I noticed that some students were able to complete projects effectively with some teacher scaffolds. Problems arose when they hadn’t gone to PjBL schools in the past, or had certain types of learning challenges that made self-directed learning difficult. Students also struggled if they did not receive enough of, or the right kind, of scaffolds from instructors to be successful in the project.
Given the challenges at the other levels, I wondered what it was it was like in primary grades, in which reading and writing skills and math facts are just being formed. Can first graders access and benefit from PjBL?
Interview with PjBL Teacher and Designer:
Claire Deken is a first-grade teacher and project designer at High Tech Elementary. She also received her training at High Tech High Graduate School of Education. Claire has been a first-grade teacher for six years at this school. I asked her to reflect on one of her projects to help me understand how teachers plan, scaffold, and assess first graders in PjBL.
Sometimes the 1st-grade teachers at Claire’s school collaborate, other times they don’t. Collaboration can look different for different projects. On this project, the other two teachers on the team did projects on the same topic, but with different experts and deliverables. This project was designed by Claire and completed by her 22 1st grade students.
All of the High Tech High schools use exhibitions as part of the assessment process. All students are expected to attend and explain their work to parents, their school community, and members of the broader community like project experts and neighbors. At Claire’s school, they don’t do grades in first grade. Teachers write narrative progress reports twice a year.
2. Overview of the Case
Tide Pool Project Overview:
Claire partnered with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. At the time, they had a small tide pool in one of the research facilities but it didn’t have any information with images to explain the creatures in the tide pool. Experts would also bring people out to the tide pools in San Diego and guide them, but they didn’t have any visuals that explained and identified all the creatures in the four tidal zones. The question Claire’s class worked on was “What are all of these plants and animals and how can we help people identify them in the tide pools?”
The solution was decided upon by Claire and the experts at Scripps rather than the first graders. They chose a product that students would be able to create with minimal teacher intervention, that would be authentic to the situation, and that would align with the learning goals of the course, which were informed by Common Core standards. They would make a booklet that described some of the animals and plants a person might see in tide pools. Students practiced doing research, working in groups, and presenting information to an audience.
Students visited the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the beginning of the project to hear about the problem. They also visited at the end and were able to use the class-made booklet to identify different plants and animals in the tide pool. This aligns with the PjBL frameworks that encourage realistic (if not real) problems and access to experts. (Reiser, 2021)
Claire’s Class Challenges:
Claire’s first-grade students were all at different academic levels and had various learning challenges. Some of her students were English Language Learners. One student had a modified curriculum and support coach so Claire collaborated with the coach to modify the assignment for that student. For many of these animals, there were very few sources outside of Wikipedia. For other animals, the resources available were not at a 1st-grade level so Claire had to do additional work to make it accessible for them.
Students at this school come from multiple racial, socio-economic, and cultural backgrounds and live in different areas. As a charter school, students all come from different parts of San Diego. They had different access to and prior knowledge of the ocean. Some had more beach access than others. Learning and motivation to learn can be greatly increased by authentic interest and curiosity. When students feel what they are learning is relevant to their life, it promotes positive outcomes. (Duke et al., 2020)
For the project deliverables, students would each be responsible for one plant or animal that was in one of the four tide pool zones. The students would write a short piece (3-4 sentences) and illustrate it. All of the illustrations and descriptions were compiled in a booklet by the teacher and provided to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography to replicate and display for their visitors and hand out when they toured tidepools.
Before starting the project with students, Claire described her thinking process. She started with the final product: writing a booklet about tide pools. Then she thought about the steps leading to the final product. She made decisions at each step about what scaffolds to implement. Students needed some prior knowledge to be successful. Claire explicitly taught students that there are four tide pool zones. This project took about ten weeks for students to complete.
3. Solutions Implemented
Explicit Writing Instruction:
In the middle or high school area, some subject areas will have students work on the project for the entire class period, or subject areas will collaborate to create interdisciplinary projects. Elementary teachers teach multiple subjects. They often cross multiple disciplines but math, reading, writing, and other fundamentals are explicitly taught utilizing a curriculum or learning theory that is something other than PjBL.
In Claire’s classroom and many elementary classrooms in this charter network, project time is in addition to teaching the other primary subject according to an outside curriculum. For instance, Reading and Writing are based on the Lucy Calkins Reading and Writing Project curriculums for 1st grade. Claire explicitly reminds students of the steps of writing they learned from this writing program previously as she models her project and as the students move through the project. (Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, 2021)
1: First writers think of an idea
2: Then they plan their idea
3: Then they write an idea
Project Steps and Scaffolds:
One major scaffold was that Claire started with a teacher model. She worked on an animal and showed each step ahead of students. They were able to see the steps she took before performing them on their own. She would describe her thinking process aloud. There was a lot of instructor guidance for many students. Claire had to ask a lot of follow-up questions and re-read a sentence with them to help a student find the right information that would be relevant.
Step 1: Each student picked the plant or animal they wanted to write about and were split into groups based on their tide pool zone. Students worked in groups depending on their zone but they all had their own plant or animal. Each group had about six students. In this way, the group aspect of the project was scaffolded from the beginning. Although students were in small groups, the work of one student wasn’t dependent upon the work of another student, which is a collaboration skill that is not necessarily developmentally appropriate for this age group. Additional scaffolds included visual supports and sentence starters.
Step 2: Students would rotate from doing other independent work to a station with Claire, where she would do a shared reading about their zone and the plants and animals in that zone. The small groups facilitated teacher instruction. The shared reading involved the teacher reading a sentence and the students following along with a text. They might repeat the teacher after some of the key phrases. They would read sentence by sentence and discuss after each sentence makes sense of the complex vocabulary and concepts that were beyond 1st-grade levels independently. In this way, students practiced collaborating and were supported by each other in reaching an answer.
Step 3: Students highlight important information. Important information was decided upon by teacher interview and prompting and student response (both verbal and written). Students kept their information in research binders. Students would write down the information they learned and could write on their own, or with teacher guidance.
1st Grade Writing With Teacher Guidance In Small Groups:
- Claire and students sit in a circle with mini dry erase boards and markers.
- Claire writes sentences including every word that is above their independent writing level. (example: photosynthesis) For any word that is at their level, she’ll leave a blank.
- Students copy her words, filling in the blanks with words they know.
- Example: They may be able to write “can” and “I” and even practice words like “cucumber” as long as the parts of the word are phonetically spelled or patterns that they’ve already learned, ex the “cu” sound.
- Students copy certain sentences in their research binder if it applies to their plant or animal.
For some students with learning gaps or challenges, or who could not complete the learning task with this scaffolding, Claire would write out their ideas and they would copy full sentences from her example. She explained that when first graders are copying word for word, they might not be telling the words apart, so she would also make sure they were identifying the separateness of each word through interviewing. “What is this word? Or what’s my message?” So students don’t go on autopilot when they are copying.
Step 4: Claire works one on one with each individual student. They would go through the student’s research binder and dictate what was important about their animal (which they had highlighted on their paper) as she wrote. When students were not able to dictate important information from their paper to Claire, she would interview them. For example: “Let’s talk about the sea cucumber. What does it eat? Where does it live?”
Step 5: Students drew and illustrated the animal which would serve as an illustration for the written piece. Some students traced a line drawing found by Claire on the class lightbox, others drew their creature free hand. They colored them. Claire compiled them in a pdf file for the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and to display at the school’s exhibition.
4. Outcomes
There was a school-wide exhibition, where students presented their work. They also went back to the research tide pool and were able to identify some of the animals based on their brochure. Students were excited to see things they knew and to see their work displayed.
The assessment was largely informal. Throughout the project and at the exhibition, Claire notes: How much can a student say about the topic? Can they talk about other creatures in their zone? Can the student use their writing piece and illustration to help them communicate? Throughout the project, Claire asked questions like: “What is a tide pool?” “What Zone are you in?” “Can you explain what’s going on in the project?”
There was very little formal assessment involved and this project was a lot of work for the teacher particularly in the curation of sources including people and articles, the shared reading, interpretation, and analysis of sources, and Interviewing and writing based on student dictation.
Project-based learning is supposed to encourage students to be hard workers while the teacher is the facilitator. (Harmer, 2014). This makes sense in the medical school context that this has been most extensively studied in. In a first-grade context, it looks much different. (Duke et al., 2020) It’s ok for some work to be done by the teacher as long as the kids have ownership of some part of it. According to Claire, “Trying to do PjBL with little kids and neurodiverse learners is not about having them do every single part of it.”
Students Did Developmentally Appropriate Hard Work:
- Learning from experts
- Analyzing vocabulary and concepts they weren’t used to
- Having group discussions
- Annotating written information
- Drawing a scientific illustration based on photos and source descriptions
- Deciding which information was important (with class and teacher help)
- Presenting information to an audience
5. Implications
Implications of the Project and Case:
There is very little research about PjBL in primary grades. The research that is out there is limited and doesn’t necessarily show efficacy. There is more (but still sparse) research about the positive benefits of PjBL for older students. (Ferrero et al., 2021) In my experience, students who learned how to do school from the PjBL approach were better able to do projects later in their academic careers. They were better self-directed learners and critical thinkers. If nothing else, projects like Claire’s prepare them for the rest of their schooling at a PjBL school. (Can et al., 2017)
In Claire’s experience, students who are really good at building conceptual understanding get really invested in science projects. There have been studies that show that science in PjBL can promote growth in primary grade students. (Kokotsaki et al., 2016) Claire also noted that science projects like this are often a good access point and content area for kids to shine who don’t experience as much success in other concrete areas. This is also supported by at least one study that supported the notion that students with special needs and learning challenges can benefit from project-based learning academically and in motivation. (Kaldi et al., 2011)
Claire said the students were engaged. Students were really excited to be experts. They enjoyed talking about their sea creatures and exploring tide pools. Claire noticed that the ocean tended to be a topic that most of her students could get excited about, while some students had a more explicit connection to the ocean. Student engagement in authentic learning is very important. (Holm, 2011)
References:
Can, B., Yıldız-Demirtaş, V., & Altun, E. (2017). THE EFFECT OF PROJECT-BASED SCIENCE EDUCATION PROGRAMME ON SCIENTIFIC PROCESS SKILLS AND CONCEPTIONS OF KINDERGARTEN STUDENTS. Journal of Baltic Science Education, 16(3), 395–413. http://oaji.net/articles/2017/987-1497964232.pdf
Duke, N. K., Halvorsen, A. L., Strachan, S. L., Kim, J., & Konstantopoulos, S. (2020). Putting PjBL to the Test: The Impact of Project-Based Learning on Second Graders’ Social Studies and Literacy Learning and Motivation in Low-SES School Settings. American Educational Research Journal, 58(1), 160–200. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831220929638
Ferrero, M., Vadillo, M. A., & León, S. P. (2021). Is project-based learning effective among kindergarten and elementary students? A systematic review. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0249627. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249627
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Holm M. Project-based instruction: A review of the literature on effectiveness in prekindergarten through 12th grade classrooms. River Academic Journal. 2011;7:1–13. https://www2.rivier.edu/journal/roaj-fall-2011/j575-project-based-instruction-holm.pdf
HTH Graduate School of Education – Reimagine Education. (2021, November 25). High Tech High Graduate School of Education. https://hthgse.edu/
Kaldi, S., Filippatou, D., & Govaris, C. (2011). Project-based learning in primary schools: effects on pupils’ learning and attitudes. Education 3–13, 39(1), 35–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004270903179538
Kim, S., Raza, M., & Seidman, E. (2019). Improving 21st-century teaching skills: The key to effective 21st-century learners. Research in Comparative and International Education, 14(1), 99–117. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745499919829214
Kokotsaki, D., Menzies, V., & Wiggins, A. (2016). Project-based learning: A review of the literature. Improving Schools, 19(3), 267–277. https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480216659733
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National Education Association (2012). Preparing 21st century students for a global society. Washington, D.C. (US): The Association; 2012 March. https://dl.icdst.org/pdfs/files3/0d3e72e9b873e0ef2ed780bf53a347b4.pdf
Research. (2021). Scripps Institution of Oceanography. https://scripps.ucsd.edu/researchTeachers College Reading and Writing Project. (2021). Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. https://readingandwritingproject.org/