Reflection on Problem-Based Learning

Refection on Problem-Based Learning

Deja-Vu.

Seems like I’ve seen this somewhere before.  Students are broken up into groups and have been given a strategy with which to solve a problem.  The instructor acts more like a facilitator than a grand exalted disseminator of knowledge.  Learning is collaborative.  Students are responsible for their own learning.  Oh yeah…that’s Guided Design!

But, wait…we’re in a new chapter now, aren’t we?  It appears to me that Problem-Based Learning is pretty much the same thing as Guided Design, but with greater emphasis on beginning with open-ended, ill-defined and ill-structured problems.  Such an approach is ideal for subjects where divergent thinking is symptomatic of the field of interest, such as health sciences, education, and engineering.  It occurred to me as I was reading about PBL that this kind of thinking is what detectives thrive on.  PBL should be enormously popular in criminal justice classes.

Let’s face it, the traditional approach to education is coming under greater fire as time goes on.  Educational approaches are like tools….we can mold them to fit our particular need, and considering how PBL has caught on since the 50’s, it is obvious that, for some academic areas at least, it is of enormous benefit to the students.

PBL also resembles Cooperative Learning in that the group is responsible for the material that is being learned.  The learning process is organized and directed with support from an instructor or tutor.  Students are asked what they do not know, and are required to do research to find any number of possible solutions.  Such an approach is easily transferable to real-life situations beyond the halls of academe.

Hung, Bailey, and Jonassen (2003) state that “a primary goal of PBL is to prepare students to be self-directed, life-long learners and practical problem solvers.”  They go on to say that such preparation “contrasts with the need to prepare students for standardized tests.”  This statement resonated with me due to a situation posed in a previous class at NSCU:  that of the ethicalness of teaching to a test.  It must be remembered that college is NOT the real world, and that students must pass standardized tests before becoming licensed professionals.  Still, I think that the transfer of problem-solving skills that PBL affords ameliorates the doubts of most of the skeptics.

Koschmann (1995) forward PBL as a means of fostering “hypothetico-deductive reasoning, which “has been described as hypothesis generation followed by inquiry (Elstein, Shulman, & Sprafka, 1978.)”  There are several ways in which students develop this reasoning, also referred to as “the clinical reasoning process. (Barrows & Feltovich, 1987, cited in Koschmann, 1995.)  Firstly, ill-structured problems resemble real-life situations faced by health professionals;  they are examined in small-group settings, allowing for collaboration among team members; and students must be proactive in doing the necessary research to find the best solution to the problem.  All things considered, I think this would qualify PBL as a superior means of teaching health science or engineering.