Bringing Team-Based, Project-Based Learning to Scale

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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.