Overview of the Escape Room Project:

If you're looking for a fun, challenging, and valid culminating project for virtually any course, then an escape room style experience is a great option to consider.  

Such a project would involve designing an escape experience where the various elements within the escape room would require a firm knowledge of the units in a course. For example, in my Grade 12 economics course, I make sure that there is at least five elements made for each escape room: one element  for each of our units. I do the exact same thing in Grade 12 Law. 

This is a great project for students to either work on by themselves, in partners, or even in small groups. Either way, students are challenged to both design and produce an escape room style experience. Teachers can change the requirements for each student depending on the size of the groups that they'll allow. For example, you could require that each student designs a certain number of elements themselves, and work cooperatively on a another prescribed number of elements. I tend to make my escape room worth 10% of the overall course grade, while also having an exam that is worth 20%. However, teachers could certainly adjust that weighting to suit their course and the size of their escape room project. 

Advantages of the Project:

The escape room project has a lot of appealing features, including the fact that:

i) it forces students to dig into material from the course in order to design elements of the escape room. Obviously, this serves as great review. 

ii) it requires students to know material from the course in order to design or play the escape room. (It's not one of those culminating projects that anyone could do without actually knowing anything about the course material.) 

iii) it activates imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration. All highly valued goals in education, today.

The Caveat:

You should make it clear to your students that you want to make sure that the elements of an escape room project do involve some creativity. In other words, you don't want to see a bunch of multiple choice quizzes where the correct answers produce the correct combination of a lock.

The Rubric: 

This project fits very nicely into the streamlined Global Studies Achievement Chart that I've made available in a previous post. However, if you would like to download a PDF rubric specifically developed for this project, you can do so from the link at the bottom of this article.

The Five-Sentence Model:

In the five sentence model, the first sentence establishes the general issue, the second sentence provides more specific detail about the issue, and then, if possible, segues into the purpose of the study. The third sentence briefly describes the study’s methodology. The fourth sentence briefly outlines the study’s findings, often providing some specific statistical data, and the fifth and final sentence provides a brief statement of the study’s implications for society, policy, or research.

I have included a colour-coded exemplar below. 
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Exemplar:

In recent years, high-profile fatalities involving school-aged pedestrians crossing the street at designated crosswalks have elevated the issue of pedestrian safety, especially with respect to highly vulnerable pedestrians. While Section 136(1) of The Highway Traffic Act clearly outlines the requirement to stop at posted stop signs, little is known about the average driver’s propensity to comply with this law. This study gained insight into this question by observing motorists as they approached a suburban stop sign, and then coding their behaviour into one of three categories: “full stop,” “rolling stop,” or “slow and go.” The study’s findings suggest that the majority of drivers do not comply with the requirement to stop at stop signs, with more than one in four drivers almost completely disregarding the stop sign. These findings suggest a need to solicit greater compliance rates amongst Ontario drivers with respect to Section 136(1) of the HTA.


​Sentence Number and Objective:

1st: Establishes the general Issue.
2nd: Provides more specific detail about the issue, then segues into the purpose of the study.
3rd: Briefly describes the study’s methodology.
4th: Briefly outlines the study’s findings, often providing some specific statistical data.
5th: A brief statement of the study’s implications for society, policy, or research.


Note:

Directions for further study are not explicitly discussed in most abstracts, although they may at times refer to the general need to conduct more research in a certain area.
​

To my mind, the field study is the new essay. Don't get me wrong, I remain a staunch advocate for teaching essay writing (see the 80-Minute Challenge, the Art of Argument, and The Decline of the English Language), but I believe that students must understand how so much of the knowledge they are taught was actually generated in the first place. I think this will not only help them become better students, but critical thinking members of society as well. 

The benefits of teaching students about field studies, as well as involving students in the development of their own field studies, has itself been the topic of scholarly investigation. Dr. Barbara Manner published the results of her own investigation of field studies as a pedagogical approach back in 1995. She discovered that involving students in the creation of original field studies revealed many benefits. "For students, field studies create opportunities for first-hand experiences that encourage critical thinking, long-term retention, transfer potential, positive attitudes towards science, appreciation for nature, and increased scientific curiosity" (Manner, 1995).

I have integrated field studies into my economics programs for at least a couple of decades now. In more recent years, I have implemented a more comprehensive field study project across all of my courses. I find that my students not only enjoy the field study project, but they become far more comfortable with the basic scientific method involved in designing a study, collecting data, and then drawing inferences from that data. 

Over the years, my students have discovered so many interesting - even shocking - phenomenon through their own field investigations. Student field studies from my courses have generated data that would suggest:

• restaurants set prices so as to benefit from Canada's rounding to the nearest nickel law, 
• blue-eyed people are far less likely to require corrective lenses,
• people who speak two languages are inclined to achieve higher grades in school,
• people who wear watches are more inclined to achieve greater academic success,
• older people are more inclined to hold money at home in the form of cash,
• males are more prone to being left-handed, and
• youth will be served in retail outlets up to four times faster if they are dressed in a private school uniform.

These are just a few of the interesting inferences my students have discovered for themselves over the years. More importantly, while these students have been designing, implementing, and presenting their studies, they have also been examining and critiquing each other's studies in an effort to isolate possible flaws in study designs, such as post-hoc fallacies, false directions of causality, and composition errors.

Naturally, developing and implementing a field study is not something that students can do overnight. It is critical to first teach students what field studies are, and what they are not. In my program, I focus heavily on five main components of the field study. To my mind, these include the issue, methodology, findings, inferences, and directions for further study. I have included a link below to an activity that helps students explore and summarize field studies before they set about designing their own study. This activity encourages students to listen to online interviews between journalists and researchers discussing the findings of a new study. I have opted to pursue this approach because it requires students to listen to an entire discussion without searching for, or cutting and pasting, information from a web page. Moreover, this activity helps students differentiate between field studies and other things that might easily become confused with a field study, such as an experiment or mere anecdotal observations.

Consider implementing a small field study activity or even a larger field study project in your program. You may be surprised what your students will discover.


References:

Barbara Marras Manner (1995) Field Studies Benefit Students and Teachers. Journal of Geological Education: March 1995, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 128-131. 


Resources: