Case Study

Project-based learning

William Kilpatrick argued in 1918 that children learn by doing, not by listening.

Global

In 1918, William Heard Kilpatrick published "The Project Method" in the Teachers College Record, arguing that students learned most effectively when they pursued purposeful activities of their own choosing rather than passively receiving instruction.1 Kilpatrick, a student of John Dewey at Columbia University, was building on Dewey's philosophy that education should mirror the conditions of real life rather than preparing for it in the abstract.2

Kilpatrick's article was reprinted more than 60,000 times. The idea that children should learn through projects, not lectures, entered the mainstream of American educational thought and never entirely left it.

Project-based learning in its modern form requires students to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge over an extended period. Unlike traditional assignments, the project is the curriculum, not a supplement to it. Students acquire content knowledge and skills in the course of completing the project rather than learning them in advance and applying them afterward.3

High Tech High, a network of charter schools founded in San Diego in 2000, became one of the most visible implementations of project-based learning in the United States. Students spent the majority of their time working on interdisciplinary projects, and the schools reported college enrollment rates exceeding ninety percent.4

60,000

Reprints of Kilpatrick's 1918 article "The Project Method" in its first year of publication

The model found adoption beyond K-12 education. Aalborg University in Denmark has organized its engineering curriculum around project-based learning since its founding in 1974, requiring students to work in teams on real-world problems from their first semester.5 The approach has been studied and adopted by universities across Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

A 2021 meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research found that project-based learning produced higher academic achievement than traditional instruction across multiple subject areas and age groups, with the strongest effects in science and among students from lower-income backgrounds.6

Timeline

1918

William Kilpatrick published "The Project Method," reprinted more than 60,000 times.

1974

Aalborg University in Denmark organized its engineering curriculum around project-based learning from its founding.

2000

High Tech High opened in San Diego as a network of schools built entirely around project-based learning.

2021

A meta-analysis found project-based learning produced higher achievement than traditional instruction across subjects.

Endnotes

1 William Heard Kilpatrick, "The Project Method," Teachers College Record 19, no. 4 (1918), 319–335.

2 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916).

3 John Larmer, John Mergendoller, and Suzie Boss, Setting the Standard for Project Based Learning (Alexandria: ASCD, 2015).

4 Larry Rosenstock, "High Tech High," in The Power of Project-Based Learning, ed. John Larmer (Buck Institute for Education, 2014).

5 Anette Kolmos and Erik de Graaff, "Problem-Based and Project-Based Learning in Engineering Education," in Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

6 Chen and Yang, "Revisiting the Effects of Project-Based Learning on Students' Academic Achievement," Review of Educational Research 91, no. 1 (2021).