New Perspectives in Science Education

For students in Kanazawa Institute of Technology, the learning portfolio is the valuable record of learning in college and at the time of graduation. Students reflect on the learning activities based on the learning portfolio, to prepare for the next learning activities. For some students, the learning portfolio and their resumes are submitted to the employers of organizations they hope to intern or join. However, it is difficult to explain the abilities of individual students to a third party (an outsider) with reference to the outcomes of the entire team. Students acquire “the ability to set goals” and the “skills to cooperate with others,” which are required as the fundamental capabilities of a member of society. In this situation, we developed “a learning portfolio system for project-based education” for supporting individual students, and applied it to a class. This paper mentions the outline of the developed system and the results of the application to education.

The student teams work on the following 5 stages as project activities. This is similar to the design process for general production. Each class of Design Project is attended by about 40 students, and each team is composed of 5-7 students.

1. Stage of identifying problems: To find problems worth tackling in project activities
2. Stage of clarifying problems: To see through the problems by surveying needs, etc. and elucidating the needs of those who are related to the problems (users)
3. Stage of creating ideas: To suggest many ideas through such methods as brainstorming
4. Stage of selecting ideas: To set evaluation criteria for discussing feasibility and select the most feasible idea as a solution based on the consensus of members
5. Stage of cementing ideas: To discuss the feasibility of the solution (crystallize ideas) and describe the results with posters and reports.

We discussed a showcase-type learning portfolio system for describing the progress and history of each project in an understandable manner. The system was developed based on a commercially available printmaking system, so as to output the products stored in the learning portfolio system as booklets. The printmaking system selected for this study was the automatic typesetting system InPeria developed by Kurashiki Printing Co., Ltd. InPeria swiftly typesets the data inputted from a web browser, and enables users to check a PDF sample. We focused on this simplicity, and developed the portfolio system for Design Projects “PBL-InPeria” based on InPeria.