# @edutopia on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CXolQ-tMifW
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/20303574-edutopia-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/54dc43f3a9.jpg
- **Posted:** 2021-12-18T18:22:50.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Edutopia (@edutopia) — https://gondola.cc/edutopia

## Caption

Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies.

Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms.

Now two new large-scale studies—encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students.

In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia, elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.

Follow #EDUResearchHighlights2021 as we highlight 10 of the most significant educational studies from 2021—covering topics from bias in kids' books to the ‘paper versus digital’ war.

For more information and a clickable link to the research study check out our link in bio.

#PBL #ProjectBasedLearning

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## Tags

projectbasedlearning, eduresearchhighlights2021, pbl

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