Effectiveness
Designed
- Student Level
- Participating students were to be tuned to ‘learn-to-learn’ with a realization that learning is an on-going process throughout their lifetime;
- Participating students perform as well as their counterparts from traditional classrooms on traditional exams, perform better on tackling unfamiliar problems and are better practitioners of their professions.
- Participating students were to acquire interdisciplinary knowledge and become proficient in problem-solving, self-directed learning and team participation;
- Participating students can apply their acquired knowledge on daily life and serving the community.
- Teacher Level
- Teacher-student relationship would be further promoted through constant mentoring, encouragement and communication;
- Teacher-teacher relationship would be furthered enhanced through interdisciplinary PBL and hence reinforce professionalism development;
- Participating teachers were to establish and coordinate small-scale learning community in school.
- Community Level
- The successful experience of the present project was to lay a strong groundwork for the incorporation of PBL into the science curriculum.
Actual
- Student Level
- Students enjoyed learning more. When students were placed at the centre of the learning process, they felt empowered. They enjoyed the freedom to decide what to learn and ways to explore the issues that they were interested in. They treasured what they had learned throughout the activities.
- Students realized the importance of learning to learn. By situating students in authentic field situation, students were able to develop their higher-order thinking skills. They started to realize the importance of adopting a new approach to learning and ways to help them become lifelong learners.
- Students were able to develop self-confidence in learning. When students were provided with equal opportunities to participate and contribute in groups, they had a chance to demonstrate their potentials and multiple intelligences. Video-taped students’ performance in the project activities acts as supplementary evidence to indicate that students, regardless their academic levels, were able to show confidence in expressing their thoughts and ideas.
- Teacher Level
- Teachers had developed a deeper understanding of PBL. By engaging teachers into both learners and facilitators’ activities, teachers developed a deeper understanding of PBL, particularly with the ‘field’ component.
- Teachers were able to grasp the main strategies of PBL. By situating teachers in authentic field experience, they were able to grasp the main strategies of conducting PBL activities, particularly the role and techniques of the ‘facilitator’.
- Teachers were able to work out solutions in tackling the constraints of PBL. Through group sharing and discussion after PBL activities, teachers were able to address important issues concerning the adoption of PBL, and at the same time work out resolutions to the foreseeable constraints and problems.
- Teachers were able to put theories into school practices. With the provision of guidelines and consultancy advice by the project team, teachers felt confident in setting up their school-based PBL curriculum. The two successful examples of school-based PBL curriculum implementation indicated the success of the current project.
Evidence
- Assessment of participants;
- Visit reports from QEF staff and Monitoring Subcommittee;
- Report from external assessor;
- Number of beneficences;
- Invitation for delivering training workshops to school and teachers;
- The QEF subcommittee had highlighted in its visit report that the learning strategies devised ‘could serve for model learning to train Liberal Studies teachers in the New Secondary School Curriculum
