March 2016, Google DeepMind and AlphaGo dominated news headlines just as it dominated professional Go player Se-dol LEE. Not only did the match between AlphaGo and Lee show just how far artificial intelligence had come but it also forced people to face the elephant in the room: will human beings become obsolete?

According to a recent study, roughly 47% of all jobs in the United States over the next 10~20 years might be at risk due to automization. Confronted by a seemingly dire outlook, the importance of education to equip current and future generations with the right type of knowledge and skillset has come to the fore.

One solution can be a learning method known as ‘Project-Based Learning (PBL)’. Quite intuitively, PBL involves students solving projects with his/her peers. Students propose projects themselves, and find solutions themselves. This, in theory, enables students to learn academic content in a more organic setting and develop problem solving skills which can take a back seat when applying more traditional pedagogical methods. Perhaps most important is the fact that PBL can do all of this without adversely affecting academic achievements measured using traditional metrics.

Take, for instance, a school class that focuses on the topic of ‘Democracy and Elections’. In a traditional setting, students would rely on the teacher using textbooks to transmit knowledge on democracy and elections. In a PBL setting, students can come up with a project on perhaps ‘Student council elections’ and develop election pledges, debate with other candidates, and carry out trial elections as part of the project which will help them learn not only the academic concept of democracy and elections but also the dynamics of those two concepts and how to solve potential problems that may occur during the process.

KDI School Professors Ju-Ho LEE and Booyuel KIM – along with Dr. Yoonsoo PARK from KDI and Professor Syngjoo CHOI from Seoul National University – recently published a report “Education Reform through Project-based Learning (PBL)” on KDI FOCUS, a research publication by KDI. With regards to PBL, Professor Ju-Ho LEE said, “Not only is Project-Based Learning an important starting point for education reform in Korea, it is also at the core of such reform.”

According to the report, PBL enhances the 4Cs of student competency – Communication, Collaboration, Critical thinking, and Creativity. To prove its impacts, PBL was applied in two middle schools in the Daegu city for seventh’s graders The ability to communicate and cooperate among students was measured both before and after the experiments to gauge PBL’s effectiveness. Results were compared to three other middle schools within 2km of the subject schools.

Prior to their PBL classes, teachers at the two subject schools went through a three-day PBL training program. This helped teachers understand what PBL is, learn relevant PBL class procedures, and develop effective PBL questions. In addition to the training program, consultation sessions were held every two weeks to help teachers hold more effective PBL classes.

As for the students, a baseline survey was carried out at all five schools (678 students from two PBL schools and three comparison schools) in August, 2015 to measure their communication and cooperation competencies. An endline survey was carried out once again in December, 2015.

According to study results, PBL improved an indicator for communication by 20%p and an indicator for collaboration by 8%p while having no negative effects on academic performance in reading, English, math, and science. Despite its short duration (one semester), this PBL study is significant due to the fact that it was able to improve communication and collaboration among students in such a short period of time. These results were reported in detail to President of the Republic of Korea and Senior Secretary to the President for Economic Policy at a public Economic Council.

What then, is the situation in Korea? According to an OECD survey in 2013[1], Korea was ranked the lowest among all countries surveyed in terms of the proportion of PBL class activities. Not only did Korea lag behind advanced economies but it also ranked below developing countries such as Mexico and Malaysia.

At the root of this problem is the fact that Korean education is geared towards achieving high scores for university admissions. Students are trained to memorize and regurgitate information in the form of multiple choice questions during examinations. With the advances in artificial intelligence expected to help computers deal with these single-layer problems more effectively than mankind, it is imperative that our future generations become more adept at solving multi-layered problems with more creative solutions. In that regard, developing policies that incorporate PBL into school curriculums is imperative. Professors LEE and KIM believe there are four strategies to promote PBL in Korean classrooms: 1) take a phased approach to increase the number of schools using PBL modules; 2) offer teacher training and consulting programs tailored to each school for more effective PBL; 3) implement PBL modules during the free semester period; and 4) offer incentives for teachers to implement PBL.

There is no denying that the Korean education system was one of the most powerful growth engines that lifted Korea out of extreme poverty. Times, however, have changed which means that Korea now needs to find a new direction for its education system and PBL is a promising option there is.

[1] Surveyed countries: Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Canada (Alberta), Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, UAE (Abu Dhabi), UK (England) and US (excluded from the research as the data did not meet the requisite standards)
[2] OECD, TALIS 2013 Results: An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning, OECD Publishing, 2014.

By External Relations and Development Division