PBL Student Work Analysis

1-1) Creating Candy- imagine that you are a candy company who is struggling to compete with another company who has just released their most successful candy ever! That is the problem the fifth grade students in my first selection were asked to do. The students needed to determine what kind of candy they were going to create, based on consumer feedback, how it should be packaged, and how much they can charge for their candy.

1-2) After School Special: A PBL Unit for Grades 7th- 8th-in this PBL a group of students is being asked to design a space in their town’s community center. The center is designating the space to be used as a teen center; however, they do not know what the space should become. They are eliciting the help of local teenagers to create a plan that is educational and yet recreational. The students need to budget, create a floor plan, determine what materials will be needed and be ready to defend why their plan was the best.

1) The two plans are very different. In the Creating Candy PBL one of the strengths was the range of mathematic objectives and extension objectives. Overall, the Candy group put a lot of detail and guidance in the project, which allows for the wide range of math concept covered. However, there are a couple of weaknesses in the project. The group’s guided questions were not very helpful. The guided questions are intended to prompt students when they are stuck or confused. The guided question in this project more or less reiterated the instructional goals of the assignment. Furthermore, the group left very little flexibility in the assignment, every day was meticulously planned out, perhaps so much that it began to detract from the meaning of the assignment. The second PBL, After School Special, was strong in that it allowed for a lot of creativity and independence though out the entire process. This group chose to incorporate journaling, as a means of assessing the students reasoning methods and justification for their decisions regarding the youth wing. Each day of their lesson outline included the activities and the possible guided questions that would be helpful to the students as they worked through the process. Overall I felt that the After School Session PBL is a cohesive project, I didn’t recognize any major flaws in the assignment.

2) The Creating Candy PBL is a very restrictive PBL assignment. However, After School Special allows the students a lot of independence and flexibility in their work. At this point I don’t know what level of flexibility is best for students; however, it is clear that these two groups choose two very different approaches to this assignment. When comparing the two PBL’s I noticed a substantial difference in the way each group incorporated mini lessons in the overall project. I felt that the Creating Candy mini lessons did not fit well with the flow of the project; whereas, the budgeting assignment in the After School Special PBL, was a logical assignment that helped the students complete the rest of the project.


3) In general I feel that both assignments are rather restrictive. My understanding of the Problem Based Learning assignment is that it should allow students flexibility and creativity. In the second project, the School Special PBL, the group used journaling to help make the students accountable for their work. I like this idea; however, I would change the assignment a bit, I would have the students keep a learning log, all their mathematic problems and scratch work would be done in their learning logs and the students would write their feelings, reactions and frustrations. This would also help the teacher have a log of the areas of the project that were problematic which might need revision in the future.

4) In the Creating Candy the students were clearly focused on incorporating as many mathematic concepts as possible. There are many content standards involved in the project; however, the group seemed to neglect the many process standards, they are clearly present in the work; however, the group did not call attention to them or specifically assess them. In the second project, After School Special, it’s clear that the students were attentive to both the content standards and the process standards; each was addressed numerous times in three separate rubrics that the students created to assess the PBL.


5) The Creating Candy PBL was very thorough in assessing all the mathematics objectives that were taught in the lesson. However, there are some specific problems with the rubric. For instance students who have earned an “excellent” in the rubric must have demonstrated “much evidence” supporting the mathematic topics covered. I question a teacher’s ability to measure “much evidence.” My experience is that rubrics should be much more explicit. However, in the second group no specific mathematic concepts are assessed, merely that the group was neat, organized and that their final product was effective.