Abstract:

The project-based learning (PBL) methodology is becoming an important student-centered pedagogy and is gaining its space in secondary and higher education.

The way PBL integrates the school curriculum highly differs from other classic methodologies. Through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems, students are able to discover new knowledge in an active and inquiry-based learning way.

This learning style profoundly contrasts with the paper-based teacher-led instruction where rote memorization continues to be the protagonist, style still prominent in the university world.

Instead of this traditional teaching methodology which uses to present established facts, project-based learning implies a radical change in the approach to acquire those curricular contents. Through poising contextualized problems, questions or scenarios to be solved, the new methodology aims to increase the level of motivation among students who are able to directly understand the use and purpose of those pieces of knowledge they are supposed to learn.

It is a fact that the project-based learning methodology is becoming more and more well-known among secondary schools which are, over time, starting to implement them in their structural teaching methods. This sophisticated methodology is therefore eclipsing and displacing the more traditional teaching strategies in the secondary school and may, sooner than later, become also more relevant in the Spanish University sphere.

This article aims to explore and discuss, based on a four-year experience working with PBL methodologies in secondary education, all the benefits and challenges that an educational institution should face when implementing these methods in order to reach success, laying emphasis on possible common features and differences between secondary and higher education, and on how these could feed-back mutually to improve their performance. Among others, the experience revealed that ensuring a suitable coordination between the teaching staff is crucial for a proper implementation of PBL.

Keywords:

Project based learning, K12, higher education.