Week 5 Reflection

Problem-based learning is promising and offers an alternative way to assess students’ skills and capabilities. By coincidence, my cousin asked me to complete a questionnaire for his Geography project. Out of curiosity, I asked him the details of his project.  They worked in small groups and decided on a topic related to a societal issue in Macau.  They chose traffic problem in Macau.  With the guidance of the teacher, they created a questionnaire and completed the survey.  Then they did a presentation about their results.  It sounds like an interesting project. It is related to students’ life and students choose their own topic, but, to my surprise, my cousin commented that it is a boring project.  That night I went home and read Gaer’s article on “Less Teaching and More Learning” again.  I tried to understand and figured out what went wrong with that project. Then I called my cousin to ask for further details.

Here are my guesses:

• Though students are given the freedom to choose a topic, the topic chosen by my cousin is not meaningful to him and his group.  I think if the teacher could describe the project in more details and explain the motive for doing this project, students will see the purpose of it.
• The final step of this project is a presentation of the findings to the students’ own classmates, so they don’t see value in it.  I think if they can use the data and write a proposal to the relevant department about the issue, it will make the project more meaningful.
• The topic chosen is too easy.  Even before doing the survey, students already know the results. 
• There is no rubric so students do not know how they will be evaluated, and thus losing direction and motivation.

I searched on the Internet for more information about problem-based learning and I found this diagram on the cycle of problem-based learning from Virginia Commonwealth University.

After reviewing, I think, if the assessment parts (class reflection, evaluate peers/self, synthesis learning, moderated discussion, evaluate learning) of my cousin’s project can be reinforced, it will become more meaningful.

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I was tempted to create a WebQuest for my final project. Indeed, I started to work on one, then I realized the difficulty in implementing it, so I dropped this idea.  The class that I will implement the change has a very structured curriculum with set standards so there is not much flexibility.  Therefore, I decided to start with something small --- a class blog.  Since it is my first time to create and use a personal blog, I have no idea how to create a class blog.  Classes will start next Thursday, so I have to work faster and have my class blog set up as soon as possible.