Designing Preschool Project-Based Learning for Teacher Pedagogical Change: A Design-Based Case Study in China

Project-based learning (PjBL) can connect inquiry, collaboration, and authentic problem solving, but preschool enactment depends on developmentally appropriate tasks and on how teachers organize classroom inquiry. This design-informed case study examined a five-phase PjBL curriculum framework in one kindergarten in Shandong Province, China. The primary unit of analysis was one intervention teacher's pedagogical practice; one comparison teacher provided contextual contrast. Each class included 10 children aged 5-6 years. The framework was refined through three separate reviews by preschool-education specialists and enacted across three project cycles over approximately eight weeks. The evidence corpus comprised three cycle-level planning sets, 18 complete focal-activity observations (nine per class), four Chinese interview transcripts containing 39 question-response units, child artefacts and project-wall records, and 18 observation-linked researcher memos. Reflexive thematic analysis integrated these sources. Across the intervention-class observations, the teacher increasingly connected activities through task chains and project-wall evidence, used more open and evidence-oriented prompts, supported peer comparison and role negotiation, and used documentation to plan subsequent activity. The comparison teacher more often followed discrete theme activities, procedural questioning, product checking, and display-oriented documentation. Child-level records provided contextual evidence of follow-up questioning, material comparison, group-role negotiation, and return to earlier drawings or plans, but no child learning outcomes were measured. Interview evidence indicated that the five-phase structure worked together with orientation, examples, an open-question bank, collaborative review, and simplified documentation. The study therefore identifies a practice-oriented configuration rather than an independently validated intervention. It contributes a mechanism-based account of how task-chain planning, open prompts, project walls, and documentation can redirect teacher attention toward inquiry continuity and children's thinking.

project-based learning; preschool education; curriculum design

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