Science students’ attitudes, learning, critical thinking and engagement in project-based learning

In Project-Based Learning (PjBL), students are at the center of the learning process, where they actively collaborate to solve real-world problems. The aim of this study’s research was to explore students’ opinions of PjBL lessons across several factors: attitude, learning, critical thinking and engagement. To gather data, a questionnaire was administered to 167 students from six universities in Kazakhstan. The results revealed that students’ attitudinal scores towards PjBL were lower than their learning, critical thinking and engagement scores. Additionally, female students reported more positive attitudes towards PjBL than their male counterparts. The study found no variation in attitudes, learning, critical thinking and engagement of PjBL among different academic disciplines. Moreover, there was a weak positive correlation between students’ math scores and their engagement in PjBL. These results have implications for how future PjBL activities can be organized and how curriculum can be developed to enhance students’ attitudes towards PjBL.