Bringing Team-Based, Project-Based Learning to Scale

哈佛大学获得了NSF改善本科生STEM教育探索轨道奖，以促进采用有效的教学策略，增加学生在STEM环境中的学习和培养学生的创造力。以前的研究已经证明，基于团队和基于项目的学习是提高学生学习和创造力的成功策略，同时提高来自代表性不足群体的学生的留存率。然而，这些教学实践给讲师带来了很大的工作量，他们被要求对丰富的、个性化的项目作业进行评分，并创造一个鼓励学生积极团队合作的环境。为了克服教师的工作量障碍并改善对学生的反馈，该项目将创造技术来扩大已建立的教学模式，该模式结合了基于团队的学习和基于项目的学习。这项技术将允许教师在没有广泛的教学支持的情况下，在大班中实施这些有效的做法。PI团队将在以前基于团队和基于项目的学习的工作和过去非常成功的教学技术的开发的基础上，为基于团队和基于项目的学习创建一个易于实施的团队评估和同行评分系统。该系统将由两个组件组成。首先，它将为团队评估提供标准。这些规则通过征求学生对自己的贡献和同龄人对团队项目的贡献的反馈，帮助教师激励学生在团队合作中的积极行为。这种团队评估根据学生在项目工作中的相对参与度来影响他们的成绩，并给出学生作为团队成员的表现的反馈。第二，该系统将提供一种机制，在团队学习的环境中促进同伴评分，以减轻教师的评估负担，同时为学生提供有效的学习工具。该系统基于网络，用户友好，易于实施，并将大大减轻教师使用基于团队和基于项目的学习的负担。该项目的评估将有助于我们了解基于项目的STEM教室中的同行评分，教育技术设计的最佳实践，以及理解学生在高度协作的学习环境中的团队体验。

Harvard University has received an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Exploration Track award to promote the adoption of effective teaching strategies that increase student learning and foster student creativity in STEM environments. Previous research has established that team-based and project-based learning are successful strategies for enhancing student learning and creativity while improving retention for students from underrepresented groups. However, these teaching practices result in a high workload for instructors who are required to grade rich, personalized project assignments and create an environment that encourages positive teamwork experiences for students. To overcome this workload barrier for instructors and improve feedback given to students, this project will create technology to scale an established teaching model which combines team-based and project-based learning. The technology will allow instructors to implement these effective practices in large classes and without extensive instructional support.Building on previous work in team-based and project-based learning and past development of highly successful instructional technology, the PI team will create an easy-to-implement team evaluation and peer grading system for team-based and project-based learning. The system will have two components. First, it will deliver rubrics for team evaluation. These rubrics help instructors incentivize students' positive behavior in teamwork by soliciting students' feedback on their own contribution and the contributions of their peers to team projects. This team evaluation affects students' grades based on their relative participation in project work and gives students feedback about their performance as team members. Second, the system will provide a mechanism to facilitate peer grading in a team-based learning environment to ease the assessment burden on instructors while providing an effective learning tool to students. The system is web-based, user-friendly, and easy to implement and will significantly reduce the burden on instructors using team-based and project-based learning. The evaluation of the project will contribute to our knowledge of peer grading in project-based STEM classrooms, best practices of design of educational technology, and understanding of students' team experiences in highly collaborative learning environments.