If you’ve ever stared at the board in math class and wondered when you’d ever need to use the quadratic formula in your future career, or struggled to understand the difference between meiosis and mitosis in your biology classes and felt you were wasting your time, we’ve all been there. Many of our core classes, specifically math and science, sometimes feel repetitive — you memorize concepts, crank out the problems and cram everything just for the test. Then you proceed to forget 80% of it the instant you turn the test in to make room for the next cycle and repeat.
Why can’t math and science classes be more project-based, like electives and the humanities? Why are our math grades mostly a reflection of test performance, only proving our ability to regurgitate information under artificially timed situations? If schools want students to retain what they learn in math and science, projects need to play a bigger role than they currently do. With engaging group projects and career-oriented assignments, project-based classes, like current electives and humanities classes, feel applicable to life and are taught in a fun and interactive way.
Projects provide the best of both worlds to the teachers and students: they allow for more student agency, reveal the applications of concepts, teach students how to work in a group setting and reduce stress.
Specifically, projects connect abstract concepts to real-world problem-solving. While many students study concepts intensely, they often gloss over the application and how these concepts can be applied outside the classroom. By connecting concepts to life, students can learn to problem-solve using school knowledge. This important connection to real life is one that must be emphasized more in math and science classrooms, and projects provide the perfect platform to do so.
A meta-analysis study on the academic impacts of project-based learning, published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal, showed that project based learning significantly improves students’ understanding and absorption of material and leads to more academic achievement and positive attitudes.
Additionally, very few careers involve handing you a pencil and saying, “You have 90 minutes to show me everything you know.” Work in a significant number of careers more closely resemble group projects with long deadlines. Giving students the chance to work in groups to create projects prepares them better for future endeavors. Every adult must know how to have a mature, clear conversation, and high school projects provide a pathway to reaching that point.
Lastly, the stress is different. Regardless of the math or science lane, with the amount of stress on students to score high and achieve, additional stress from frequent tests is unnecessary. A test is almost like a sprint, whereas a project is like a hike. You can slow down, trip, ask for directions and keep moving toward your end goal. Yes, there’s still a deadline, but you’re not sweating buckets and getting anxiety attacks because you forgot the volume of a sphere.
Currently, most honors math lanes have around one project per year, including Analysis Honors’s finance project and AP Calculus BC’s volume project, and science classes regularly have labs for students to conduct. This is a great start and is the basis for showing students how the concepts they learn can be helpful in the future, but students should have even more opportunities to learn about the real-world applications of their learning in a cooperative and fun way. Already, many English and History courses, primarily classes in the Social Justice Pathway, successfully incorporate a variety of projects throughout the year to aid students’ learning, and math and science classes should do the same.
Some may say that projects are subjective and messy. But so is life. Grading a test is easier because it’s just checking boxes, but assigning projects is about seeing what students can do with their creativity, giving them space to think outside of the box and apply key concepts.
Another major issue with projects is the work distribution. We’ve all been in that situation where one kid does no work while the rest of the group completes the project. Even the undeserving group members get all of the credit in the form of a grade — which some think is equally as important as the work. One way to address this is to ensure the work is evenly distributed among the group members by having an individual element in group projects — maybe a reflection, a log where teachers can track the work each student personally completes or a teamwork survey at the end.
While it may seem like more effort and time for teachers to build projects and provide time for students to complete them, the benefits of a significantly increased comprehension of the material through projects are worth spending extra time on. In addition, while it is difficult to find a balance between giving students freedom in projects while not being too strict in the rubric, these challenges in maneuvering agency and freedom are helpful in teaching students how to work in real-world situations — but with the guidance and support of their teachers.
We propose a more equal balance between tests and projects as an evaluation of content comprehension throughout the semester in STEM classes. Tests can allow teachers to check foundational skills, while projects can show how well students apply the content to real life.
This will provide for a more well-rounded assessment of each individual student while reducing the pressure of time-related stress. Meanwhile, projects also make learning the concepts that much more fun. Overall, STEM departments and teachers should reevaluate their assessment formats to provide space for both tests and projects throughout the year — if schools are meant to prepare us for the real world, our learning should reflect this by providing opportunities to find applications for the material we learn.
