Abstract:

Brazilian Federal Institutes are a network of 38 Institutions of education, science and technology spread in all states of Brazil, composed by 644 campuses offering vocational, undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

This federal network has the main purpose of:
(i) offer professional and technological education in different levels,
(ii) foster applied research associated to the productive arrangements,
(iii) stimulate innovation, and
(iv) develop and transfer technology to the society.

Due to the practical nature of the courses at Federal Institutes, with the majority in the areas of Engineering, Computing, and Business, the use of projects as a pedagogical strategy has become increasingly common, especially for assigning grades in the composition of evaluation criteria system. Projects in the classroom are as old as the classroom itself, but according to Larmer et al. (2015), it has been seen assignments and activities that are labeled as “projects” but which are not rigorous Project-based Learning (PBL) and consequently compromises the learning process. Chandrasekaran (2013) reported the Project-based Learning methodology as a student-driven and teacher-facilitated learning approach that can be applied in order to achieve the 21st century skills. Based on an extensive literature review and the accumulated experience of the many educators, Larmer et al. (2015) created the research-based model Gold Standard PBL. They aimed to provide the Essential Project Design Elements to help educators in the development of successful projects that maximizes student learning and engagement. The seven elements are the challenging problem, sustained inquiry, critique and revision, student voice and choice, reflection, authenticity and public product. This research work tried to find out evidence of Essential Project Design Elements according to Gold Standard PBL on the ad-hoc teaching practice using projects as a pedagogical strategy at Brazilian Federal Institutes. The researchers conducted a survey with 170 lecturers (N = 170), following a quantitative data analysis using analysis-frequency distribution. The researched population was from different knowledge areas, such as Engineering (N = 46), Informatics (N = 40), Languages (N = 17), Business (N = 16), Biology (N = 14), Teacher Training (N = 11), Environmental Management (N = 10), Architecture (N = 6), Chemistry (N = 3), Math (N = 2), Scientific Methods (N = 2), Law (N = 1) and Physics (N = 1), as well as from twenty different Federal Institutes spread on all regions of Brazil. Extract of the free survey answers was quantified and associated with Essential Project Design Elements. According to achieving findings, 23,5% of the participant lecturers have not used projects in their subjects and, although 80% of the respondents have never heard about Project-based Learning methodology, more than 50% of the participant lecturers have applied at least four from the seven Essential Project Design Elements. This work concluded that some Essential Project Design Elements have not been considered by the most part of participant lecturers, like student voice and choice, authenticity and public product, as well, what can take to wide variation in the quality of project design and classroom implementation.

Keywords:

Project-based learning, exploratory study, Brazilian Federal Institutes Network.