Abstract
Hands-on project experiences are becoming common in education, but often, while students do a fine job of completing a project, they don't learn as much from these projects as they could or should. Learning by Design™ (LBD™), based on the cognitive model implied by case-based reasoning (CBR), a model of learning from experience, provides guidelines for orchestrating and facilitating hands-on activities in classrooms in ways that promote transfer. We've identified many of the affordances and potential affordances for transfer that project and problem-solving activities provide, and we've designed classroom rituals and practices that help teachers and students identify those affordances and act on them. Of most interest are our poster sessions, gallery walks and pin-up sessions and our rules-of-thumb tables. We've implemented our approach in several Learning-by-Design curriculum units and evaluated them with over 3000 students.
