Project management looks back upon a history up to the beginning of the 20th century. Today it can be considered as an established form of organization of projects in the world of economy. Project management is used in particular then, when it comes to innovations. For the future it is expected that project work will keep on gaining importance, when in the same time routine activities will decrease.
On this background the necessity for introducing project management as a topic in vocational education rises. First approaches in Germany are already been developed for example in different curricular frameworks for vocational schools.
Vocational education in Germany has targeted the development professionals skills and of the personality as well as the ability to actively shape the working context structures. The introduction of the “Lernfelder” in the middle of the 1990s marked the shift to a new instruction structure that is based on authentic professional situations and problems. On the basis of complex and exemplary settings and tasks the development of cooperation and problem-solving skill, systemic thinking are supposed to be supported.
As a didactic counterpart of the “Lernfeld” concept can be considered action-oriented instruction approaches, in particular project lessons. The “Lernfeld” concept offers new, advantageous conditions for project lessons. Nevertheless project lessons still represent in the vocational education only a minority. Missing systematic project didactics as well as lacking teaching and learning-materials are regarded to be some of the reasons for that.
The assumptions of the effects on learning of project lessons was up to now only examined in few studies. Unfortunately the studies had different underlying project lessons conception, for example with regard to the starting conditions, the leeway for Autonomy and to the amount of systematic planning tools offered to the learners. In addition, none of these previous research studies incorporate important aims of vocational education for instance the development of cooperation skills.
In a research project at the Bremen University based upon the analysis of different current project-based instruction concepts a draft concept of project didactics was developed. On this basis a project-based teaching-learning environment for project management was developed.
In this case too, the question regarding the effects of the developed environment on learning arises. Focusing cooperation, the research question addresses is: In which manner are learners cooperating in the developed project-based teaching-learning environment and which factors in which manner influence cooperation.
