Why this approach is important

This approach is important because it gives students the opportunity to work independently. They will have to gather, process and structure information. They will have to make decisions about what information to include, what not to include and how to present the information. These are all skills that they will need when they leave school.

Projects also give your students the opportunity to become ‘experts’ in their chosen field. Projects can be used to provide gifted students with additional assignments and enrichment activities. This will give them confidence that will benefit their learning in science. The project should be based on a topic in the science curriculum, but it could include aspects of other topics within science. It could even be a cross -curricular project that incorporates aspects of mathematics or geography, or even English. In this way, project work can help your students to make connections between topics and therefore improve their overall understanding of science and its relevance to their lives.

Pause for thought In order to realise the benefits of project work, you will need to plan carefully. What do you think you could do in order ensure that the project work is a success?

Video: Planning lessons

How you set up and introduce the project work is very important. For students to be motivated and engaged, they must be interested in the topic, so you need to offer them some choice of questions or titles for them to research for their project. The nature of the school curriculum means that you will want to focus the project work on one topic, but you need to be flexible about what they choose to research within that topic. The main benefits of project work are the skills and confidence that it will help your students to develop.

You also need to ensure that they have access to information and that they are clear about the expectations, such as how long the project should be and how their work will be assessed. The rest of this unit will help you to learn how to run project work successfully.