Practice of 21st Century Skills-Oriented Project-Based Learning: A Case for Developing Application Software

Abstract

Rapid technological advances and globalization of the 21st century have caused a large change in people's way of life and how to think and learn. On the other hand, modern society have various complicated problems such as terrorism, conflict, refugee problems, poverty, and environmental issue. Today's children must face the problems in the future. However, the education type which provided to them is the previous century type. Under the circumstances, 21st century skills have been proposed. In this study, we did learning environment design, practice, and assessment of 21st century skills-oriented project-based learning. The contents of the project was to develop application software for checking the electricity usage in our university campus, and the implementation period was 6 months. The team was composed of 13 like-minded members. They were sophomores and juniors, whose majors are social science, in the same seminar. After the end of the project, members had self-assessment of 21st century skills. As a result, we found that the learning environment of the project enabled members to acquire 'critical thinking, problem solving and decision making' and 'learning to learn / meta-cognition' in 21st century skills. In addition, members experienced a leader recorded the high scores for each skill. Hence, this indicates that the member who has experience of leader in the project acquires higher level 21st century skills. On the other hand, we found that this project unsuitable to acquire 'life and career skills' and some 21st century skills.

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Author Information
Yuki Kiridoshi, Prefectural University of Kumamoto, Japan
Ichiro Iimura, Prefectural University of Kumamoto, Japan

• Category: ACEID2016, Oral Presentation, Paper Available
• Tag: Higher Education,

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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