This article presents useful take-aways from a small scale study of students participating in a student-driven, problem-based science curriculum. Researchers found the prompts and support instructors used to guide students through the curriculum and activities, sometimes called thinking scaffolds, were critical to the growth of deeper level thinking skills.
Any teacher launching a problem-based project could try out the thinking scaffolds presented in this article, such as prompting students to include context and asking open-ended questions. For further reading, this Edutopia article also provides an overview of the study.
Source Organization: Harvard Graduate School of Education