Education Commons^™

Mission To Planet Markle: Problem-Based Learning For Teaching Elementary Students Difficult Content And Practices, Melanie Peffer, Maggie Renken, Patrick Enderle, Jonathan Cohen

Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Young children can struggle to learn difficult disciplinary content and important skills for practicing science. Problem-based learning (PBL) may be useful for addressing such difficulties, yet evidence to support its usefulness in elementary school-aged children is limited. We considered the role of a PBL unit in improving students’ genetics content understanding and their skills specific to creating arguments with coordinated claims, evidence, and reasoning. First- through fifth-grade students participated in a six-week PBL unit about evolution and genetics. Students worked in mixed age groups and were charged with illustrating a fictitious alien species, called markles, based on a series of …