Which one of the following options best describes progressive education?

Progressive education, associated chiefly with John Dewey, treats the learner as an active participant: knowledge is built through direct experience, purposeful activity, and social collaboration rather than through rote transmission and externally imposed rankings. Its hallmark classroom practices are learning-by-doing, project-based work, and cooperative or group learning, in contrast to traditional approaches built around formal testing, ability tracking, and comparative ranking.

The combination "learning by doing, project method, cooperative learning" names exactly these three defining progressive practices together, with no traditional or behaviourist element mixed in, so it is the description that best fits progressive education.

• "Thematic units, regular unit tests, ranking" pairs a progressive-style planning idea (thematic units) with regular unit tests and ranking, which reintroduces the standardised assessment and comparison that progressive education explicitly moves away from.

• "Personalized learning, ability grouping, labeling students" pairs a progressive-sounding idea (personalised learning) with ability grouping and labelling students, a traditional tracking practice that works against the collaborative, non-hierarchical classroom progressive education calls for.

• "Project method, ability grouping, ranking" includes the project method but combines it with ability grouping and ranking, traditional sorting and comparison practices at odds with progressive education's cooperative, non-comparative ethos.