High-quality curriculum and instructional practices designed to make learning relevant and engaging, while also boosting cognitive challenge, can help to address low student engagement, chronic absenteeism, and lags in student mastery of content and skills. These problems, while present for most learners, are particularly extreme for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Applied Learning Definition: Applied learning (AL) is an umbrella term for educational approaches in which students learn through the active application of knowledge and skills to real-world tasks, with strategically-timed direct instruction and performance-based assessments supporting learning. Approaches fitting within this umbrella category include, but are not limited to: project-based learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning, inquiry-based instruction, linked learning, and career and technical education. Key features across these various AL approaches include authenticity, cognitive challenge, active learning, and sustained experiences.

Purposes of this research brief: We intend for this brief to help K-12 school and district leaders to do the following: 1) understand the key characteristics of AL; 2) explore the evidence base for the learning benefits of well-executed AL; and 3) identify what they can do to support the spread and successful implementation of AL approaches. Additionally, this brief addresses common misconceptions about and critiques of AL.

Summary of Evidence Base:  AL approaches show strong evidence of improving academic and long-term outcomes across disciplines. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have demonstrated that project-based learning can improve academic performance in Advanced Placement courses, middle school science, and elementary science and literacy, for students from a range of prior performance and demographic backgrounds. A meta-analysis across nearly 100 observational studies shows problem-based learning can lead to gains in strategic thinking and the ability to design solutions to complex, real-world challenges. RCTs have shown that inquiry-based instruction can improve middle school math scores and understanding of statistics, as well as high school science proficiency. Experiential learning can boost outcomes through various formats, such as labs and service learning. Career and technical education and linked learning are linked to higher graduation rates, college enrollment, and earnings, particularly benefiting low-income and ethnic minority students.

Less advantaged and lower performing students have traditionally had less access to high-quality instruction, including well-implemented AL. However, there is evidence of successfully implemented AL teaching and learning across diverse contexts. Recently funded federal, state, and local project-based learning, career and technical education, and linked learning initiatives, along with the growth of multiple AL school networks, are helping to expand access.

Summary of criticisms and responses: Some skeptics criticize AL for being too unstructured for students who lack foundational literacy and numeracy skills, while others suggest AL is inherently lacking in academic challenge. The brief responds to these criticisms by demonstrating that AL can be accessible, cognitively demanding, and beneficial for all learners when implemented rigorously. In addition, the brief addresses concerns about time and resource constraints by suggesting that AL does not necessarily demand expensive materials or major scheduling shifts.  

Limitations of this brief:      

• “Applied Learning” is an umbrella term. We highlight research relevant to key characteristics and instructional practices within the umbrella. 
• This research brief is not intended to be a guide to classroom-level implementation. It can guide teachers to explore AL design principles and associated evidence before consulting relevant pedagogical resources. 
• With poor implementation and/or lack of adherence to the following key characteristics of AL—for any of a host of reasons documented in the “Evidence-based practices” and “Practices to avoid” sections of this brief—AL can result in no benefits for students.

In this section, we describe four key characteristics of teaching and learning approaches that fall under the umbrella of AL: 1) Authenticity, 2) Cognitive challenge, 3) Active learning, and 4) Sustained experiences. For each of the characteristics, we provide examples, non-examples, descriptions of what to look for in classrooms, and ideas for how teachers new to AL might begin to shift their practice. 

Authenticity. Authentic learning connects students to the world beyond school.

• Authentic purposes: Student learning is connected to overarching essential questions (e.g., open-ended, requiring higher-order thinking, related to real-life problems), learning goals, and/or real-world problems that are truly worth learning.
• Authentic ways of knowing: Students practice thinking like scientists, historians, engineers, or other relevant subject-area experts, within academic, professional and practical domains.
• Authentic tools and activities: Learning tools and activities mirror those used by experts working in relevant domains. Learning experiences are aligned to developmentally appropriate academic and/or industry standards. 
• Authentic audiences: Students share their work with classroom peers, other members of their school communities, stakeholders, and/or relevant external audiences. 
• Authentic personal meaning: Learning is meaningful to students’ own experiences, interests, and/or aspirations.

Look For: Learners can provide non-generic answers to questions such as: “Why are you learning this?” “How does this connect to the ways that experts in this field do their work?” and, “How might this apply to my personal, professional, and/or civic life.”

Example:  Tenth-grade history students learn about the civil rights movement by interviewing community members and family elders, and by reading and analyzing primary- and secondary-source texts. They compile their interviews, along with their evidence-based reflections on personal and community impacts, into posters exhibited at a local community center. Students also write op-eds taking a position on a local civil-rights related issue and submit them to the school newspaper. 

Non-Applied Learning Example: Tenth-grade history students learn about the civil rights movement by reading a textbook chapter and watching a documentary film, after which they take a multiple-choice test and then write a five-paragraph essay.

Tips for getting started with Authenticity:

• Include regular opportunities for students to reflect on and discuss questions such as, “how is what I’m learning relevant to my life, now and in the future?
• Plan for students to share their work with audiences beyond the teacher and each other. For instance, invite another class, school leaders, and/or community members to visit on a designated “share your learning” day.   
• Schedule an informational interview with an expert on topics relevant to an upcoming unit. (Ex: a local zoologist for a wildlife biology unit). Incorporate connections to “ways of knowing” that your interview surfaces. 

Cognitive Challenge: Learning goals, processes, and outcomes prioritize deep learning, complex thinking, and usable knowledge.

• Deep Learning: Educators prioritize thorough and accurate student mastery of grade-level knowledge, skills, and conceptual understanding—including foundational literacy and numeracy—over broad, shallow coverage. 
• Complex Thinking: Learners engage in complex thinking as described by Bloom, Marzano, and/or Webb. They move beyond recall and comprehension: analyzing and evaluating information, synthesizing concepts across disciplines, applying knowledge and skills to novel situations, designing solutions, justifying, and reflecting on decision-making processes. 
• Usable Knowledge: Students master knowledge, skills, understandings, and/or dispositions well enough to be able to put their knowledge to use—or transfer it— to other contexts outside of the classroom.

Look For: Classroom tasks require and support learners to engage in complex thinking, develop mastery of grade-level content and skills, and transfer them across contexts beyond the classroom. Spiraling curriculum is one way to build in practice and foster improvement and transferability. 

Example: Seventh-grade math students investigate the issue of water pollution in two local lakes, using real-world data sets as well as the results from their own water testing. Using statistical evidence, they engage in a structured debate about which lake should be the first to be designated as a state clean water site. The students then assemble and present a portfolio that includes their data analysis, debate notes, and a reflection on other issues to which they could apply the math skills gained during the unit.

Non-Applied Learning Example: Seventh-grade math students take notes on a lecture about measures of center. They complete worksheet practice problems, calculating mean, median, and mode for a series of data sets. Then, weekly quizzes and a final test.

Tips for getting started with Cognitive Challenge: 

• Using a learning taxonomy such as Bloom’s or Marzano’s, audit your teaching materials to ensure tasks require students to engage in complex cognitive work. To increase complexity, shift question stems to “why,” “how,” and “in what ways” questions. 
• Cultivate a culture of elaboration by asking follow-up questions such as “What makes you say that?” and “Can you share another example of…?”  
• Include opportunities for students to reflect on and share how they might apply a given set of knowledge or skills to other situations or phenomena. 

Active Learning: Students actively drive their own learning through experience and collaboration, guided by teachers’ strategic use of direct instruction.      

• Learning through experience: Students primarily learn through purposively designed experiences, experimentation, iteration, dialogue, collaboration, and reflection. This might include “hands-on” work with physical materials, though that is not a necessary precondition for AL.
• Student-driven: Learning tasks encourage student agency, choice, active sense-making and opportunities to share perspectives, rather than passive reception of information.
• Student collaboration: Students often work together on learning tasks, in pairs or groups, cultivating inter- and intrapersonal skills such as collaboration, communication, and compassion. Teachers’ grading schemes account for individual and joint contributions to work products. 
• Strategic use of direct instruction: Teachers use lectures and demonstrations strategically and when it is “time for telling.” Additionally, with teacher-driven monitoring and feedback routines, individual students or small groups present content to their classmates. Experts may share experiences and knowledge with students. 

Look for: Classrooms with more on-task speaking between and among students than back-and-forth question-and-answer between the teacher and individual students.

Example: Third-grade students explore a local park to identify human impacts on the environment. As a class, they decide to focus on the destruction of animal habitats. Small groups create multimedia presentations on specific animals of choice, incorporating factual and literary elements from diverse texts to inform and call to action. The teacher reinforces literacy skills through periodic mini-lessons and one-on-one conferences. Finally, students hold a “wildlife conservation fair” where they share their work with peers, parents, and community members.

Non-applied learning example: Third-grade students take notes on daily teacher lectures about human environmental impacts, then individually read, summarize, and answer comprehension questions about teacher-selected texts, before going over answers as a whole group. At the end of the unit, each student writes an essay on the importance of protecting the environment.

Tips for getting started with Active Learning: 

• Plan a “launch” experience for your unit that sparks curiosity and delays direct instruction by at least a day. For example, students beginning a unit on projectiles could spend a day trying to build a rocket out of classroom materials.
• Schedule guided opportunities for students to take on a teaching role, for example, by presenting content to each other, leading discussions, and/or critiquing each other’s work. 
• Assign students specified roles in groupwork.  

Sustained Experiences: AL takes place over weeks or months. It is not a single lesson that has a hands-on component, or a “dessert” task like building a diorama at the end of a unit. 

Look For: Courses, programs, and/or curriculum units with core design features exemplifying the other characteristics of AL. 

Example: Over the course of eight weeks, twelfth-grade physics students design and build their own rockets, use them to launch weather balloons into the upper atmosphere, geolocate and recover the balloons when they return to earth, analyze the data, make a short film about the process, and then reflect on what they learned about physics, the world, and themselves. 

Non-applied learning example: Over the course of eight weeks, twelfth-grade physics students learn about the properties and components of rockets by taking notes on lectures, completing worksheets, and taking quizzes. In the final week of the unit, they work in teams to design and launch a rocket of their own. 

Tips for getting started with Sustained Experiences: 

• Ask yourself, “What can students create or work toward over the course of this unit to put their learning to use?”
• Plan backwards to turn a final AL assignment into a task that recurs or spans the whole unit. For example, have students start by trying to design a rocket with no formal prior instruction. Then, return to it iteratively every week, as they gain knowledge and skills.

RESEARCH BASE FOR APPLIED LEARNING INSTRUCTIONAL APPROACHES

AL is an umbrella term for educational approaches featuring the characteristics described above. Some of the most common, rigorously-researched approaches include project-based learning, problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, experiential learning, linked learning, and career-technical education. Below, we define these six approaches, summarize the defining features of each, and refer to relevant evidence for each. 

The purposes of the examples below are to 1) substantiate the research base for AL and 2) help our audiences identify where AL may already be taking place. Notably, we did not attempt to exhaustively reference every impact study of approaches to AL as evidence in support of AL’s efficacy. Instead, below we reference the most rigorous recent quantitative studies available for each of the six types. We define well-executed randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and regression discontinuities as the most rigorous type of quantitative evidence, followed by other types of quantitative evidence (e.g., meta-analysis, correlational).

Project-Based Learning: Students engage in authentic, teacher and student-posed learning challenges, working alone and in groups on complex tasks organized around driving questions, and produce final public work products. Most of the evidence is in the K-12 setting.

• Design Elements: challenging problem or question, sustained inquiry, authenticity, student voice & choice, reflection, critique & revision, public product.

• Outcomes/Demonstrated Benefits:

• Improved high school student science and social science achievement, engagement. Effects were significant and of similar positive magnitude for students from lower- and higher-income households, districts serving majority lower- and higher-income students, and across course subjects. (RCT) 
• Improved middle school student science achievement. Effects were significant and of similar positive magnitude for students regardless of their parents’ education level or their own race/ethnicity. (RCT) 
• Improved elementary science achievement, reflection, and collaboration. Results were similar for students across the distribution of reading ability. (RCT) 
• Improved elementary literacy in low-income schools with a baseline of low academic performance. (RCT) 
• Improved ability to use knowledge/transfer social studies knowledge to novel scenarios (Correlational)

Problem-Based Learning: Students working collaboratively learn by resolving complex, minimally structured, cross-disciplinary problems representative of professional practice. Problem-based units are generally shorter—a week or two—than project-based, which more typically take a month or two. Problem-based learning does not necessarily include student development of artifacts, though project-based learning does. Most of the evidence is in the post-secondary setting, though with a few exceptions as specified. 

• Design Elements: authentic, minimally structured problems, student-centered approach, teachers as facilitators.

• Outcomes/Demonstrated Benefits (spanning K-12 and postsecondary education):
  • Improved science knowledge and skill development, long-term retention, and student and teacher satisfaction. (Meta-synthesis) 
  • Gains in strategic thinking, designing solutions to complex challenges. (Meta-synthesis, primarily post-secondary, particularly medical education) 
  • Improved middle school science scores and demonstrated conceptual understanding. (Qualitative and pre-post comparison)

Inquiry-based learning: development of knowledge and skills through active investigation of student-developed research questions. Most research evidence comes from K-12 settings.

• Design Elements: student-developed research questions, data collection, analysis, presentation of research findings, and reflection.
• Outcomes/Demonstrated Benefits:
  • Improved middle school math scores; increased belief in real-world applicability of math. (RCT) 
  • Improved understanding of statistics, students engaged in higher cognitive complexity tasks. (RCT) 
  • Improved high school science proficiency. (RCT)

Experiential Learning: Concrete, authentically-contextualized experiences lead to reflective thinking, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. Most of the evidence is from post-secondary settings.

• Design Elements: Concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, active experimentation. Common forms include: service learning, class projects, labs, simulations, and travel programs integrated into before and after classroom learning.

• Outcomes/Demonstrated Benefits (The vast majority of research addressing experiential learning is in the postsecondary education setting):
  • Improved learning outcomes across service learning, labs, and simulations in college business, pre-med, and engineering courses (Meta-analysis).
  • Reduced time to college graduation, increased likelihood of attending graduate school and/or finding employment after graduation (Correlational) 
  • Increased plans for civic action; improved self-assessments of interpersonal, problem-solving, and leadership skills; and course satisfaction. (Correlational)  

Linked Learning: an educational approach for high-school students that combines college-focused academics, rigorous technical education, work-based learning, and personalized student supports. Most research evidence comes from K-12 settings

• Design Elements: rigorous academics, career technical education, work-based learning, comprehensive support services

• Outcomes/Demonstrated Benefits:
  • Improved 11th-grade ELA scores (SBAC); increases in credits accumulated, perceived teacher support, and belonging (RCT)
  • Increased HS graduation rates, credits earned, students classified as college-ready in ELA, exempted from remediation; decreased dropout rate. Similar benefits for English Learners (credits, dropout rates, 4-year college enrollment), African American (credits, 4-year college enrollment), and Latino (credits, dropout rate, graduation) students (Correlational)
  • Improved HS graduation rate, meeting of A-G requirements; lower suspension rates (Quasi-experimental) 

Career & Technical Education: courses and programs that integrate core academic knowledge with technical and occupational skills required for specific jobs and fields of work. Most research evidence comes from K-12 settings

• Design elements: Courses and programs focusing on knowledge and skills required for specific jobs and fields of work.

• Outcomes/Demonstrated Benefits:
  • Increased rates of on-time HS graduation, particularly for low-income students; test score benefit for low-income students; more earning industry-recognized credentials (Regression Discontinuity)
  • Increased earnings, attending college, especially among low-income, Black and Latino students, and those with disability (Correlational)
  • Improved HS graduation rates, particularly among low-income students and those concentrating in CTE; higher wages  (Review article)    

Table 1 provides selected evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and regression discontinuity research studies. The table highlights how AL approaches can improve standardized test scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment. Other studies, referenced above though not included in the table, show that AL can boost student engagement, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills.

Table 1: Summary of randomized-controlled trial evidence demonstrating positive impacts of AL approaches on students’ standardized test scores, probability of high school graduation, and probability of college enrollment.

Blank boxes do not necessarily mean the given AL approaches do not improve given outcomes. Rather, our work did not surface rigorously executed RCT or regression discontinuity evidence demonstrating the positive impact of the approach on the outcome.

BROAD VARIATION IN MODELS AND CONTEXTS

AL does not have to be all or nothing. While there are a few examples in the United States of entire systems of schools designed to effectively offer AL approaches, this is not the norm. Educators typically offer AL opportunities within courses, as units or other forms of curriculum supplementation, in course-based formats, and/or through extracurricular activities. Some offer school-wide AL. 

• Curriculum unit models: AL can happen as a subset of the curriculum within non-applied classes. This is the case when a teacher or teacher team includes a project-based unit, set of lessons, or a sustained real-world experience within an otherwise traditional course. Research suggests that AL is increasingly happening within STEM courses.  
• Program- and course-based models: AL can serve as the foundation for what happens in specific programs or courses within schools, such as Project Lead the Way. The College Board’s Advanced Placement program now offers project-based curriculum and professional learning for five courses, and project-based exams for an additional five. Key elements of AL are also often “baked into” programs and courses in the visual and performing arts and in career and technical education. School-day internships and work-based learning opportunities also often include some of the characteristics of AL.  
• Whole-school models: In some cases, AL is the foundation for most or all of the learning experiences offered at a given school. This is true for example in schools that are dedicated to “wall-to-wall”project-based learning, design thinking, and other AL models. It is also sometimes true in career academies where pathway courses and academic courses are connected via linked learning. International Baccalaureate Primary and Middle Years Programmes are examples of whole-school inquiry-based models.
• Extracurricular models: Components of AL are commonly found in school-sponsored visual and performing arts and extracurricular activities, such as student newspapers and theater productions, debate teams, and sports teams. These settings vary in their deliberate inclusion of cognitive challenge as defined above. 
• Network and system models: There are a few examples in which entire systems of schools are rooted in AL principles. For example, this is the case within networks such as EL Education, High Tech High, New Tech, and Big Picture Learning.