I. 3. Project-based pedagogy in Hungarian and in international pedagogical literature

Surveys, aimed at exploring the situation in the Hungarian public education system, have been regularly conducted since the late 1970s. There were and are research teams at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and the National Public Education Institute (recently called Institute for Education Research and Development). These research teams have regularly been publishing reports on school lessons and teaching methods since 2001. Examples include the following: Falus, 2001a; 2001b; 2006; Kerber, 2004; Radnóti – Csirmaz – Mayer, 2006; Radnóti, 2008. These surveys describe –among many other issues – the teachers´ knowledge and understanding of the methods used by them. In addition, the surveys try to find out how teachers learnt about the method, and also how that particular teaching method influenced their own practical work at school. Using 100 randomly selected teachers as non-representative sample, Falus (2006) and his research team concluded that 60% of the teachers were convinced that the use of diverse teaching methods was the key to the success of their lessons. In the same survey participating teachers were asked to look at 15 different teaching methods and state whether or not they knew them, or applied them in their own classroom teaching. They were also asked to rank the teaching methods according to the frequency of use. The 15 methods included in the survey were as follows: 1)explanation; 2)discussion; 3)demonstration; 4)lecturing, 5)individual work, 6)group work, 7)pair work, 8)games, role play, simulation; 9)debate; 10) student presentations; 11)use of multimedia; 12)cooperative methods; 13)computer-aided teaching; 14)project method; 15)internet. As it was attested by research results, all the participating teachers had already heard about the previously mentioned methods, except for the cooperative and project methods. In their own teaching most teachers preferred explanations, discussions, individual work and demonstrations (the so-called traditional methods). The survey also revealed that most teachers learnt about these methods from their own teachers. New methods (including the project method, computer-aided teaching, the use of the internet or multimedia) were most often explained to them within the framework of in-service teacher training programmes. It was less than 50% that mentioned that they used new teaching methods including the project method. All the other – traditional – methods were regularly used by 60-90% of them. Radnóti and other researchers (Radnóti, 2009) investigated a sample of 531 teachers and asked them about the frequency of their use of a variety of teaching methods. The teachers were asked to evaluate the frequency of their use of the given method on a scale of 1-5. On this scale 1 meant ’never’, while 5 meant ’very frequently’. The average results of this survey underline the fact that teachers tend to use traditional methods more frequently. The average results were as follows: explanation: 4. 68; individual work: 4.28; discussion: 4.26. The new methods were used quite rarely, on average: 1.81- 2.96. The method of project-based learning got 2.28 in this survey. It also turned out that 14.7% of the teachers who had been asked had never heard about this method. 28.6% had heard about it but was uncertain. 29.8% used it occasionally. 12.4% used it frequently and 14.5% knew the method but had never used it. In order to improve the situation and help teachers working in the public education sector, today there is a growing number of pedagogical literature on project-based learning both in Hungary and abroad, and supplementary materials are also widely available. Some of these are enlisted in the Bibliography section.

PBL is very popular in environmental education, thus teachers can get acquainted with many environmental project descriptions and evaluations in this area.  (For further details see Unit 9)