Create Project Based Reviews
Examples of Rigorous Activities to Encourage Students to Study
Feb 18, 2009
Once students are familiar with the material in a lesson, it becomes easier to create rigorous projects to encourage them to both use and expand their understanding. These projects can also become the basis for a review of the material before a test. The project itself need not be a large, multi-day activity but can take the form of thought provoking questions that students need to research or discuss.
Project Based Review Activities
Projects for reviewing material can take many forms. They can be a series of questions to discuss, further investigation into an event or an assimilation of concepts into a product that shows understanding. Ultimately, the project needs to both use the students’ knowledge of the new material and demonstrate further thought or deeper understanding.
Examples of rigorous review activities are as varied as the subject matter and teacher’s teaching style. These activities can include summary information or encourage students to look at the information in a different way. For example, a kindergarten teacher could ask students to take the alphabet letter of the week and draw it as a person or turn it into the centerpiece of a drawing. The children would then be not only reviewing the shape of the letter but also looking at it in a new way which might be memorable.
Using unexpected activities in different subjects also enables students to remember the material. A math teacher could ask students to discuss in a small group different ways a familiar math problem could be turned into a word problem. For vocabulary reviews, students could create a crossword puzzle, requiring them to look not only at the definitions but also to work with the spelling in order to make the puzzle.
How to Know if the Project is Rigorous
It is relatively simple to create a project or review activity, but not always easy to determine if it contains rigor. There are several questions a teacher can ponder while creating the review that will also help identify if it contains rigor.
- Are the students at the center of the review and the teacher assisting where needed?
- Do the students collaborate during the activity or project?
- Are the students asked to investigate the material more in-depth than originally presented or somehow internally motivated to determine an answer?
- Does the final result or product require students to use skills or knowledge outside of the current subject?
Answers of yes to at least two indicate at least some rigor is in the project. The key is that students are using their knowledge to discover something new or decide on an answer to question and present it in a multi-disciplinary way.
Using project based activities to review can turn the review into a student-centered activity that encourages students to both reexamine the material and look deeper for new meanings. It can also be a fun and interesting way to include rigor into the curriculum.
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