When Gil Leal took AP Environmental Science in his junior year of high school, he was surprised by how different it was from his other AP classes. Instead of spending the bulk of the time sitting through lectures, taking notes, and studying abstract texts, his class visited a strawberry farm in the valley nearby.
It wasn’t just for a tour. Leal and his peers were tasked with thinking about the many challenges that modern farms confront, from water shortages to pest infestations and erosion. More surprising to Leal: Students were asked to design their own solutions, incorporating what they had learned about things like soil composition, ecosystem dynamics, and irrigation systems.
“In other classes, it was lecture, readings, test,” said Leal, “but in AP Environmental Science we worked on projects with other students, discussed our ideas, considered different perspectives — and I learned so much more this way.”
Leal’s AP class, taught by Brandie Borges, is part of a new generation of classes that transform traditional teacher-led instruction into a more student-centered, project-based approach — requiring students to work together as they tackle complex, real-world problems that emphasize uncertainty, iterative thinking, and innovation. Proponents of project-based learning (PBL) argue that it fosters a sense of purpose in young learners, pushes them to think critically, and prepares them for modern careers that prize skills like collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity.
Critics say that the pedagogy places too much responsibility on novice learners, and ignores the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction by teachers. By de-emphasizing knowledge transfer from experts to beginners, the critics suggest, PBL undermines content knowledge and subject fluency.
While project-based learning and direct instruction aren't incompatible, evidence that might settle the deeper controversy over PBL's effectiveness has been sparse. Only a handful of studies over the last decades have established a causal relationship between structured project-based learning and student outcomes — in either direction.
But two major new gold-standard studies — both funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia — conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California and Michigan State University, provide compelling evidence that project-based learning is an effective strategy for all students, outperforming traditional curricula not only for high achieving students, but across grade levels and racial and socioeconomic groups.
The two studies involved over 6,000 students in 114 schools across the nation, with more than 50 percent of students coming from low-income households.
In the AP study, which included Gil Leal’s class along with over 3,600 students in both AP Environmental Science and AP U.S. Government and Politics courses from five districts serving a diverse student body, researchers looked at a broad range of project-based activities in the sciences and humanities.
In one example, students in Amber Graeber’s AP Government class took part in a simulation of an electoral caucus. Meanwhile, instead of simply reading about Supreme Court cases, students in Erin Fisher’s class studied historic cases and then took on real-world roles, arguing the cases in mock court, acting as reporters, and designing campaign ads and stump speeches to make their case.
Researchers found that nearly half of students in project-based classrooms passed their AP tests, outperforming students in traditional classrooms by 8 percentage points. Students from low-income households saw similar gains compared to their wealthier peers, making a strong case that well-structured PBL can be a more equitable approach than teacher-centered ones. Importantly, the improvements in teaching efficacy were both significant and durable: When teachers in the study taught the same curriculum for a second year, PBL students outperformed students in traditional classrooms by 10 percentage points.