Chapter 9: Setting First-Year Students Up for Success in a Project

This chapter provides approaches and assignments to create a project structure and subtask scaffolding to guide your students through PBL work. It also provides activities and tools to help first-year students identify gaps in research and assess the appropriate scale, size, and scope of a project.

Helping Students Refine Goals and Objectives


Students in this example class begin their seven-week team project by developing their project goal and objectives first individually and then together as a team. The benefits of this approach are that all students are involved in shaping the foundation of the project, which has an impact on student investment. Students also have the benefit of practicing the skill of developing and refining project goals and objectives, and using them to guide the rest of their project.

View these student examples to see the individual work of two students (of the group of four), and then the group product to see the differences.