Vietnamese Students Awareness towards a Project Based Learning Environment

Student-centered teaching is among the most promising approaches in which students are actively constructing their learning by formulating their own questions and answering them. Project-based learning (PBL) is one of them where students work collaboratively as a team on a project and while the educator's position is switch from the center of attention to being a facilitator guiding students' learning. Project based learning is a well-suited approach to actively engage students with real world problems and challenges in order to acquire deeper understand. This approach has already shown good results in western country education systems but no application have been conducted in Confucian Heritage Countries (CHC). CHC students, and Vietnamese in particular, are more familiar with traditional learning approach where most class time is spent with the teacher lecturing and the students listen passively. There are many challenges for CHC students to adapt to student-centered teaching and the time needed to transition limits the benefits they acquire from such approach especially PBL. Thus, the transition process is critical for these students and specific arrangement have to be done by educators in CHC countries. In particular, emphasis has to be made on collaborative learning activities. This paper investigates how to introduce project-based learning environment to CHC students with a first application in Vietnam. Despite challenges in the early weeks of their studies, the preliminary results suggest that the PBL approach is well adaptable to CHC students and Vietnamese student were able to integrate its principles effectively.