The students have returned to the course, handed in their mini project, had their feedback and are now in the throes of completing their project propsal forms.
The mini projects were useful in giving an indication into the way they work, the different approaches they took to planning and reflecting on their progress to date.
We have now started the planning stage and last week the students looked their objectives:
What skills do they want learn?
Why do they want to study the subject?
What do they want to gain from the whole process?
They also have to reflect on the reasons for their choice of subject, their future plans and how their EPQ will fit into this. In approximately nine months time they will be looking back on their reasons, the objectives, their timescales, the resources they used and taking stock of their EPQs and reflecting on what they have learnt and gained from the whole process. Evaluation is key to a successful project but is often forgotten in the relief of completing the task.
One of the things I learnt from last year, and I am going to implement this year, is to ask the students to produce a mini literature review of 3 sources to ensure that they can find and evaluate good sources. An excellent tool for evaluating resources which I will be encouraging the students to use is the Information Source Evaluation Matrix (ISEM) http://www.library.dmu.ac.uk/Images/Selfstudy/ISEMLeaflet.pdf
I also learnt from bitter experience not to sign off off any PPFs until the students have made a cast iron choice and have no intention of changing their direction half way through the project!
The next stage is time management and GANTT charts.
