Supporting students to learn with knowledge awareness-possession and desirable difficulties - An experience in project-based learning

Educators use various instructional methods to prepare their students with ability in critical thinking and problem-solving towards the ever-changing environment. Different studies revealed that students with good performance, such as obtaining good grades, do not necessarily reflect their learning effectiveness, particularly long-term knowledge retention or transfer. The current study is kindled from the primary notion, desirable difficulty advocated by Professor Bjork and experimented students' learning effectiveness in a project-based learning context related to human resources (HR) training. Project-based learning (PBL) approach is widely regarded as an effective mode to engage students. The current study aimed to find out the effectiveness of the project-based learning with desirable difficulties in engaging students to learn. Adopting the knowledge awareness-possession matrix, students were guided to work from scratch till the end with the full-fledged implementation of the HR training. The learning impacts were surveyed and showed encouraging results that students are more engaged in the learning process, able to remember and retrieve their knowledge to highly resembled cases. The students become more confident and able to retain and apply learned concepts from class to real practices.