Abstract
Project-based learning (PjBL) has been increasingly promoted and extended to online environments to enhance the quality of higher education. However, PjBL involves complex processes requiring higher-order thinking skills, which may pose challenges to many students especially in online settings with little prompt support from teachers. The problem may compromise the learning of low-achieving students, who often have inadequate higher-order thinking skills. Visible thinking approaches have the potential to make higher-order thinking processes accessible to students. This study was conducted with 72 university students who engaged in visible thinking supported online PjBL of computer programming. A one-group pretest-posttest design was adopted to compare the learning outcomes among high-, medium- and low-achieving students. The results showed that compared to high and medium achievers, low-achieving students made the most progress in product quality and thinking skills (in particular process design skills). They performed almost as well as medium and high achievers in product quality and process design skills at the end of the study. They also gained more knowledge from the project than high achievers did. Moreover, compared to medium achievers, low achievers perceived the approach as more valuable, made more effort on the study, and felt more competent in completing the project. The findings reveal the promising effects of visualizing higher-order thinking processes in narrowing the achievement gap between high and low achievers, offering all students an equal chance to engage in effective learning with projects.
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The datasets generated during the current study are not publicly available due to ethical requirements but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would thank the students and teacher who participated in this study. The authors would also thank Professor Hai**g Jiang for his valuable support for this study.
Funding
This research was supported by the Macau Foundation (No. MF2315), the General Research Fund from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR Government (No.17201415), and the Eastern Scholar Chair Professorship Fund from Shanghai Municipal Education Commission of China (No. JZ2017005).
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JP: Data curation, Formal analysis, Software, and Writing - original draft; MS: Data curation, Formal analysis, and Writing - original draft; BY: Data curation, and Formal analysis; CPL: Validation, and Writing - review & editing; JJGM: Validation, and Writing - review & editing; MW: Supervision, Project administration, Validation, and Writing - review & editing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Appendices
Appendix 1.
Table 10 here
Appendix 2.
Table 11 here
Appendix 3.
Programming knowledge pre-test
Appendix 4.
List of abbreviations:
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4C/ID: Four-Component Instructional Design
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PBL: Problem-Based Learning
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PjBL: Project-Based Learning
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Peng, J., Sun, M., Yuan, B. et al. Visible thinking to support online project-based learning: Narrowing the achievement gap between high- and low-achieving students. Educ Inf Technol 29, 2329–2363 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-11896-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-11896-1