Teacher: So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to give you some fossils to actually look at, real fossils, and you can use the evidence to support what you’re going to tell me about the fossils, all right? Some of the things I want you to tell me about–

Joseph Krajcik: Our goal was to design, develop, and test materials to see does project-based learning really promote student learning.

Teacher: All right.

Joseph Krajcik: Kids, unfortunately, are introduced to science like it’s a body of knowledge.

Teacher: Use your evidence to support your idea.

Joseph Krajcik: But science is so much more than that. Science is all about trying to figure out how things work.

Joseph Krajcik: In many respects, project-based learning mirrors what scientists do, right, trying to answer a really important question or to figure out what’s going on with some phenomena.

Student: When I let go, it started to go slower and slower, till then it stops.

Deborah Peek-Brown: Multiple literacies in project-based learning is very different from traditional science classrooms. I was a science teacher for about 30 years in Detroit Public Schools. We did cookbook experiments that usually were just validating whatever we talked about in class. When you go into a multiple-literacies and project-based-learning science class, you see something very different. You see kids that are engaged in asking questions and trying to solve problems. We developed four units for the third grade that cover a full year of curriculum that are integrated with mathematics and English language arts. They are really investigating things, they are really making observations, asking questions, they’re developing models, they’re arguing with each other about the science.

Joseph Krajcik: We integrated literacy where it was really important to support children in the learning of science.

Deborah Peek-Brown: So, we saw just in the classroom, kids getting excited about reading, because they were excited about the topic, because it was something that was related to what they were trying to figure out.

Deborah Peek-Brown: The standards in math that we chose to integrate were the ones that were so much apart of what we do in science. They’re actually measuring for a purpose in order to gather data.

Student: Ojos.

Deborah Peek-Brown: So that they can really analyze that data in order to figure something out.

Teacher: Can you see that word?

Students: No.

Student: We can’t see like a peregrine falcon.

Barbara Schneider: My role in this was to help with the design of the research.

Barbara Schneider: Part of the group would get the project-based learning and the other group would study science just as they traditionally do. We had to make sure that our sample was balanced with respect to their achievement, their population characteristics, and school enrollment size.

Barbara Schneider: We looked at 46 schools, 23 in the treatment and 23 in the control group.

Barbara Schneider: At the end of the year we gave all the students an objective science test that was developed by the

Michigan Department of Education. We found that, in fact, there was a significant treatment effect for the students that were in the treatment group.

Barbara Schneider: This was true regardless of what your gender was, it was true regardless of what your race and ethnicity was, and it was true whether you were a struggling reader, an average reader, or a very good reader.

Joseph Krajcik: We actually moved them up in their proficiencies in learning science and, so, that is really strong evidence for using project-based learning in schools, because it is different. But do the kids get excited about learning science? Do they put effort into learning science? And, so, we also measured kids’ social-emotional learning.

Deborah Peek-Brown: So, for teachers who are just starting out, just changing your instruction to say, “We’re trying to answer this question today,” so that it gives purpose to what the kids are learning. That power of “I can figure things out for myself,” is such an important skill for kids to develop that they will be using for the rest of their lives.

Teacher: Did it make a difference when I changed the straw? Ah! Now try–

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