Example of the Theoretical Foundation of a Thesis (Education)

Example of the theoretical foundation of a thesis (Education)

Example 1

Motivating Soc Trang College English Majors in EFL Writing Classes with Project-Based Learning (Le Nguyen Minh Triet)

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ON PROJECT-BASED LEARNING AND MOTIVATION

To have a better understanding of the notion of learner motivation and some theories of Project-based Learning (PBL), it is helpful to examine the literature in two relevant fields: Project-based Learning and Motivation. Therefore, the chapter that follows will present findings relating to these main areas and the effect of PBL on learner motivation.

2.1 Project-based Learning

2.1.1 A brief history of the Project-based Learning

Project-based Learning has a long history. William H. Kilpatrick first discussed PBL in an article called “The Project Method” in 1918. He believed that using literacy in meaningful contexts would provide a means for both building background knowledge and achieving personal growth. He also stressed that projects should have been driven by learners’ questions. Then John Dewey (as cited in Wrigley, S., 1998) and other leaders of the “progressive” movement in education supported “learning by doing”. According to these educators, children learned best through experiences in which they had an interest and through activities that allowed for individual differences. Because of the benefits of experiential, hands-on, learner-centered learning, “Doing projects” has been a long- standing tradition in American education. The root of Project-based Learning lies in this tradition. However, the emergence of this method is the result of two important developments over the last 25 years. First, it is the revolution in learning theory. Studies in neuroscience and psychology have showed that there is a close relationship between knowledge, thinking, going, and the context for learning. Learners actively use what they know to explore, negotiate, interpret, and create rather than responding by “feeding back information.” Thus, the emphasis has shifted toward the process of learning. Second, the world has changed. Almost teachers understand how the industrial culture has shaped the organization and methods of schools in the 19th and 20th centuries. Because of the need for education to adapt to a changing world, PBL is increasingly popular. To sum up, PBL is said to be an attempt to create new instructional practices that reflect the environment where learners live and learn now.

2.1.2 Definitions of Project-based Learning

“Project-based Learning” (PBL) means learning through experiences (Solomon, 2003). Moreover, it is known as a model for classroom activities that shifts away from the classroom practices of short, isolated, teacher-centered lessons, and instead of this, it emphasizes learning activities that are long-term, interdisciplinary, student-centered, and integrated with real-world issues and practices. It is also defined as an individual or group activity that results in a product, presentation, or performance over a period of time (Moursund, 1999). According to Moss and Van Duzer (1998), PBL is an instructional approach that contextualizes learning by providing learners with problems to solve or products to develop.

For me, PBL should be identified as a comprehensive approach to instruction where learners of any ages, any levels of language proficiency work individually or in groups to conduct an in-deep investigation of a real-world issue. In fact, in order to produce written products, oral presentations or performances, students are required and encouraged to experiment, to do discovery-based-learning, to learn from their mistakes and to encounter and overcome challenges. Additionally, it is “real-world” in the sense that it is similar to problems and tasks addressed by adults in reality in terms of content and purpose. Actually, according to Moursund (1999), projects usually vary widely in form and content. As a result, Moursund noted that there was no universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes PBL. However, in order to have a clear understanding on this approach, an analysis of characteristics of Project-based Learning will be dealt with in the following section.

2.1.3 Characteristics of PBL

The following section will consider characteristics of PBL from the viewpoints of both students and teachers.

From the student’s viewpoint

- Student-centered and experiential learning

In PBL, learners have a choice of not only the topic and the nature, but also extent of the content of the project. Therefore, they have opportunities to pursue their own interests, questions, and make decisions about how to find answers and solve the problems. Moreover, the same project assignment can be given to students with different levels of English proficiency, academic backgrounds, and abilities. Students themselves build new knowledge and skills based on their current knowledge and skills. On conducting research, students need to gather information from a variety of sources such as books, personal interview, or their own experiments. Connsequently, different students will use different sources of information even if the projects focus on the same topic.

In addition, student-centered learning is reflected in the development of the assessment. Project-based Learning requires varied and frequent assessment including teacher assessment, peer assessment, self-assessment, and reflection. Unlike typical traditional teacher-centered classroom, assessment practices in PBL are inclusive and well understood by learners. It means this approach offers learners opportunities to participate in the assessment process of their own work. In summary, in contrast to more traditional, formal, didactic model, learners in PBL are able to be actively involved in their own learning.

- Collaboration and cooperation learning

The process of a project involves the work of a team or group of people. It is said that PBL accommodates and promotes collaboration among students, between students and the teacher, and especially, between students and other community members as well so that knowledge can be shared and distributed between members of the “learning community.” In such a case, students have opportunities to learn collaborative skills. For example, they know how to make group decision, to rely on the work of peers, to integrate peer and mentor feedback, to provide thoughtful feedback to peers, and to work with others as students researchers (Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project).

- Incremental and continual improvement

It is said that PBL shares much in common with process of writing, which includes brainstorming, organizing the brainstorming ideas, developing a draft, obtaining feedback, revising, and publishing. Meanwhile, the basis phases found in most projects consist of selecting a topic, making plans, researching, developing products, and sharing results with others. In Moursund’s opinion (1999), one of the crucial elements for a good writing is “revise, revise, revise.” Similarly, “as work on project proceeds, the project itself, and the work to be done on it is under continual review and may undergo substantial change” (Moursund, 1999). In other words, it is worthy noting that a project should be viewed as a process rather than a product. A project has time limitations. Therefore, learners themselves must make necessary decisions about how to use their time to produce an appropriate meaningful doing and learning though the time frame and scope of projects may vary widely.

- Actively engaged students

Compared with traditional classrooms, PBL ones are much noisier because students often work in groups. In other words, it is normal for conversations, movement, sharing, and helping each other to occur in PBL classrooms.

As mentioned above, classroom activities of PBL are characterized by learner- centered education, cooperation and interaction. In fact, students learn while they help each other learn. They pose the problem and figure out things for themselves. Indeed, in PBL, students spend much time working in pairs or groups to solve challenging problems. Learners decide how to approach a problem and what activities to follow as well. They gather information from different sources, then synthesize, analyze and derive knowledge from it. Generally, in class, the role of the teacher is to guide and give some advice, rather than to direct and manage student work (Solomon, 2003).

- Product, presentation, or performance

As presented, for Moursund (1999), PBL is seen as an individual or group activity that lasts over a period of time resulting in a product, presentation, or performance. One of the essential components of projects is the culminating products or multiple representations as a series of artifacts, personal communication, or consequential tasks that meaningfully address the driving question (Brown & Campione, 1994). It may be written products along with oral presentations within classroom or in the other classes within the program.

- Challenging, with a focus on higher - order skills

The attention of PBL is also paid to higher-order skills. Obviously, in order to carry out a project, students are to solve a particular problem, to do research independently, to set their own goals, and even to self- evaluate (Moursund, 1999). Naturally, solving challenging problems requires both learners’ fundamental skills (e.g., reading, writing, listening and so on) and digital age skills (e.g., teamwork, time management, information synthesizing, problem solving, utilizing high-tech stools and so on). On combining these skills, learners are encouraged to become directors and managers of their own learning process.

Moreover, on doing a project, students are offered opportunities “to experiment, to do discovery-based learning, to learn from their mistakes, to encounter and overcome unexpected and difficult challenges” (Moursund, 1999). Each student is immersed in “a rich learning environment” where they may stretch their knowledge and skills as independent, self-sufficient learners.

In brief, with regard to learners’ viewpoint, PBL is characterized by learner-centered learning, cooperative learning with incremental and continual improvement and higher-order skills resulting in a product, presentation, or performance. However, PBL is unique when it is addressed from the teacher’s point of view, which is presented in the following section.

From the teacher’s viewpoint

- Authentic content and purpose

PBL plays a crucial role as a bridge between using English in class and using English outside of class (Fried-Booth, 1997). It does this by involving students in situations that require authentic use of language in order to communicate (Moss, & Van Duzer, 1998). This teaching method also places students in realistic contextualized problem-solving environments. Thus, on working in pairs or groups to solve such problems, they need skills to plan, organize, negotiate, make their points, and arrive at a consensus about the issue. These skills are essential for living successful lives (Stein, 1995), and they are also necessary in a high-performance work place (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991). Overall, by bringing real life context to the curriculum through PBL, students are likely to become independent workers, critical thinkers and life long learners.

- Authentic assessment

Unlike the way of evaluation in traditional school setting, PBL requires the assessment of both employability skills and language skills. Because the curriculum content in PBL is identified to be authentic and real world, “the authentic assessment is a direct measure of student performance and knowledge of the authentic content” (Moursund, 1999). In authentic assessment, students deal with challenging problems and tasks, and thus the focus is on higher-order thinking skills. Learners are guided to evaluate their own work and one of their peers. The assessment toward the product, presentation, or performance is done during the projects.

- Explicit educational goal

According to Moursund (1999), the project aims at facilitating learning. It is designed to help get overall purposes of education including a focus on specific educational goals. The explicit goal in every project is to improve learners’ ability to work effectively in a problem or task team environment. In addition, the project is designed to develop students’ capacity to carry out complex, challenging, real-world projects.

- Rooted in constructivism, but uses multiple methods of instruction

In PBL, the design of the curriculum, instruction and assessment is based on constructivism. Moursund (1999) noticed that the focus of constructivism was on students being actively engaged in doing rather than passively engaged in receiving knowledge. Whereas, other constructivists (Perkins, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978) said that individuals constructed knowledge through interactions with their environment, and the knowledge construction of each individual was different. As a result, an individual was learning by constructing knowledge by building on their current knowledge through conducting investigations, conversations or activities (Grant, 2002). This is really the case in PBL. In addition, a certain period of time is provided for learners’ reflection about what they have learned. Journals are often used for this metacognitive activity. Moreover, in PBL lessons, there are usually some direct, explicit instructions from which the whole class would benefit.

- Teacher as a facilitator and a learner

In each project, students direct their own learning with teachers providing support so that students are able to plan and implement the project (Diffily, 2001). Teachers promote learning in various ways. For example, they guide students to select appropriate projects. Moreover, they raise questions, help learners think through problems, support their decisions, guide their work, and contribute particular lessons to enhance what students are learning (Diffily, 2001). Overall, during project time, the teacher circulates among the students to monitor efforts and to give help when students need. However, the projects themselves are learner-directed even though the role of the teacher in every project is very important. The teachers act facilitators and mentors who supply students with resources and advice when they pursue their investigations. Furthermore, the teacher is also a learner. In other words, teachers and their students learn together. To sum up, the teacher in PBL functions as a “guide on the side” rather than a “sage on the stage” (Moursund, 1999).

Basing on the above analysis toward PBL from the learner’s and teacher’s viewpoint, I cluster essential principles characterized PBL:

(a). Realism: “projects are realistic or authentic, i.e., they are relevant outside the classroom” (Thomas, 2000), and PBL also requires varied and frequent authentic assessment including teacher assessment, peer assessment, self-assessment, and reflection (The Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project).

(b). Autonomy: Projects are student-driven to a significant degree (Thomas, 2000).

(c). Constructive investigation: the central activities of the project must involve the construction of knowledge on the part of students (Thomas, 2000).

(d). Centrality: PBL projects are central, not peripheral, to the curriculum (Thomas, 2000). According to Moursund (1999), a key characteristic of PBL is that the project focuses on doing something rather than learning about something. It is action-oriented.