Problem-Based Learning - Science topic

Reinforcing Prof. Rebelo's answer and trying to provide a roadmap for the application of PBL, here are some essential steps gathered by Gonçalves, 2020:

1. Reading the problem, identifying and clarifying unknown terms;

2. Identify the problems, raising the points of doubt that will raise the discussion;

3. Raising explanatory hypotheses by resuming previous knowledge (Brain storm);

4. Summarize the discussion, recalling the problems listed, the diagnostic hypotheses raised, and the contributions of previous knowledge, pros and cons (carried out by the coordinator). This helps in the identification of study objectives;

5. Formulation of learning objectives in order to guide the study, identifying the points of relevance;

6. Individual study of the subjects raised in the learning objectives seeking scientific basis, validating/invalidating the hypotheses, filling in the gaps in knowledge;

7. Return to the tutorial group to rediscuss the problem in the face of the new knowledge acquired in the individual study phase; integration of information to solve the case.

The advantages of applying Problem-Based Learning are:

• Be student-centered;

• Independent learning is stimulated and rewarded, the student takes responsibility for his or her learning process;

• The curriculum is thematic, interdisciplinary and non-disciplinary;

• The teacher is no longer the holder of knowledge and starts to act as a facilitator;

• The tutorial dynamics uses a process analogous to that of scientific research methodology. From a problem, it is sought to understand, substantiate and search for data that are analyzed and discussed. Finally, hypotheses are elaborated for its solution, which must be put into practice so that they can be proven and validated;

• Group work and cooperation between subjects are central and essential elements. This even leads to the constant association of the method with Team Based Learning (TBL).

Ref:

GONÇALVES, M. F.; GONÇALVES, A. M.; GONÇALVES, I. M. F. Aprendizagem baseada em problemas: uma abordagem no ensino superior na área da saúde. Práticas Educativas, Memórias e Oralidades - Rev. Pemo, [S. l.], v. 2, n. 1, p. 1–12, 2020. DOI: 10.47149/pemo.v2i1.3676.

While I like this premise and I agree that Batman does demonstrate a real-world problem solving approach as opposed to say Superman, I am not certain we can hold Batman up as the standard for real-life problem solving. I understand the argument. Superman has powers beyond human ability, Green Lantern holds a magic ring. These are not examples of real world problem solving. Batman has to function as a regular human and therefore has to solve human problems. However, Batman is also Bruce Wayne, billionaire. He has money, time and gadgets-a-plenty. According to the comics, Batman is also a well-read genius who knows a remarkable amount of facts and is an expert in a myriad of skills, including martial arts and fencing. He has his own plane which he can fly himself. He can afford to sleep all day and be up all night or jet off to Europe for three days with no questions asked. While Batman is a good example of someone who must solve problems without magic or alien powers, he is not an "every man" type of character.

If we are going to look for a comic book hero to represent the common man, I prefer Spider-Man. The Spider-Man from the original comics, more so than the recent movies, was an everyday guy. Peter Parker had to make ends meet as a freelance photojournalist while also saving the world, yes with certain superhuman powers, but he was an average guy trying to work two low-paying jobs while also finding time for a social life.

All of that said, I think it is important to point out that no comic book hero is truly an example of good, real-life, problem solving skills. In the real world, if we have a problem to solve, most of us can't throw Bruce Wayne's money at it, nor can we wait for it in an alley down the street and beat it about the head and shoulders with our fists.

Comic books and movies provide an escape from reality. They provide a world where the hero always wins, the bullies and bad guys always get what's coming to them and problems can all be solved by the application of maximum effort and outstanding moral fiber. That's why we run to those worlds after a hard day of reality. Let's leave Batman and the others in that realm we escape to. There's no reason to bring comic heroes into the harsh reality of our world.

When students are presented with a challenge, they naturally develop a sense of curiosity and a desire to comprehend and discover answers. This stimulates their active participation and eagerness to acquire further knowledge, promoting deliberate cognitive processes.

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) necessitates students to scrutinise the problem from several perspectives, assess facts with a critical gaze, and contemplate viable resolutions. This procedure effectively stimulates their cognitive abilities, fostering the growth of deliberate thought processes. Students engage in active involvement in selecting their educational trajectory, formulating tactics, and reaching resolutions throughout the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) procedure. This fosters intentional thinking by prompting individuals to be conscious of their objectives, contemplate alternatives, and carefully devise their actions. The idea of PBL is to solve a problem based on their already acquired knowledge and wisdom, hence it contributes in decent recalling memory.

Transdisciplinary problem-based learning (PBL) is an educational approach that integrates knowledge and skills from multiple disciplines to address complex, real-world problems. It encourages collaboration among students with diverse backgrounds, fostering a holistic understanding of issues. The model typically involves identifying a problem, researching, and applying knowledge from various fields to develop solutions, promoting a more interconnected and practical learning experience.

Such cases empower student learning outcomes by facing all obesticles delaying the plan solution and rebuild rapid way for results based on solved obesticles.

Thank you for the suggestion professor.

Iam interested with you

Constructivism is a theory describing how learning regardless of whether learners are using their experiences to understand a lecture, it build critical thinking and PBL is a learning environment that embodies most of the principle that improve learning active, cooperative, getting feedback, tailored to student learning and to solve problems, both increase critical thinking in learning.

Yes, it is necessary

There are studies available comparing PBL and Non PBL

I got some clear idea from Gracious Zinyeka points. Thanks for your wonderful discussion Maria Aggeliki Myriallaki and participation Santiago Peredo Parada Solomon Melesse Mengistie

Actually , the method of education depends mainly on the nature of the subject, however, education that depends on creating a mode of interaction between students with each other and with the teacher and dependence on the practical side is the one who establishes a graduate with high skill and not relying on traditional patterns

Views differed on induction, so there are those who place it within the direct approach, and there are those who place it within the types of discovery, according to the role of both the teacher and the learner. For you, you can look for a discovery-based induction or a combination of several types of discovery.

Daivd Rempel - Thank you for your question. The success of active learning and problem-based learning is dependant on several factors. 1) training of the tutors on facilitation of discussion in small groups, and mentoring programs of teachers and regular briefing/debriefing sessions for each PBL case. 2) The healthy atmosphere in the tutorials and how effective do students and tutors work effectively to maximise outcomes from PBL tutorials. 3) Design of the curriculum and the PBL program (to build a meaningful hybrid PBL design). 4) Design of the PBL case, the template used, the cognitive elements in the design and the tutor guides of each case. 5) effective management of the PBL program and 6) Annual evaluation, and review of the PBL program, and continuous improvement of the program, and regular research on the program and publications (standards of the program).

Therefore, from my experience over 20 years in PBL and active learning worldwide, we cannot generalise and say any PBL program will end with the same planned outcomes. I came across programs that have cracks in all these elements. Do you think that these programs (looks like houses that may collapse at any time) are of educational benefit? However, maintenance and presence of experts and leaders can make these elements at optimum standards and students could achieve several outcomes including cognitive skills, reasoning, application of basic sciences to clinical situations (cases), and enhancement of communication skills and handling uncertainty.

I have published widely in this area, and you can find my publications on ResearchGate. Also, you could read my book Navigating Problem-Based Learning, published by Elsevier.

Thank you all for your responses and the discussion.

I really appriciate the response by Azer sir.

Just want to add, CBL is a subset of PBL and it is real life. There are differences between these and is well summarized in the following poster.

Further to my earlier response, I recommend reading my book "Navigating Problem-Based Learning. Churchill Livingstone, El Saviour, 2008"

Let's start with a field that I know the best: biosignals processing, clarification, and prediction. There are many unresolved problems like

* Prediction of arrhythmias

* Prediction of epileptic seizures

* Reconstruction of physiological interdependencies of various physiological processes using biosignals.

* Reconstruction of physiological paths in the brain from biosignals.

* Assessing the health condition of people using biosignals.

We can do the following research

* Data mining for disease-genome dependencies from available databases.

* Prediction of disease spreads using internet searches.

* Assessment of the population health using internet searches.

* Cross AI methods with deep knowledge of complex systems theory and apply it to medicine -- this is my area of research.

* Study and predict drug interactions and side effects in patients. This will save a lot of unnecessary suffering in those using medical drugs.

* The above can be supported by an active search through all available data for possible, future drug interactions prior to their application to patients.

* Such research can help medical doctors to avoid deadly or highly damaging drug interactions. Each patient reacts differently to the same drugs! We need to know why and especially when it happens!

* Start development of advanced AI methods tailored towards the needs of bio-medicine.

All the above depends on how reliable databases of biosignals, medical records, bio-imaging, laboratory results, and many other database build.

When you want to have successful research in the field of AI, perfect databases that are open-access are a must. We have an extreme shortage of those databases. You can build a very successful carrier by building such a database(s). :-)

This is just a short list of all possibilities. :-)

Dear Paul. Thank you for your comments. We have a range of resources we recommend for PBL. Among these are my papers and my book titled, Navigating Problem-Based Learning. Published by Churchill Livingstone: Elsevier, 2008, I enclose the cover page.

Thanks for all your wonderful opinions ...I will take them in my consideration...

Take a look at the curriculum described in this article:

Yes, if the distributions of your scores are all nornal, all the tests you considered are suitable.

However, as the scores of your sample may not be normally distributed nor you can assume the scores of your population are normally distributed, I would suggest you to report both the results of the parametric tests (i.e. the ones you considered) and the non-parametric tests (i.e. Mann–Whitney U, Kruskal–Wallis test and Spearman r).

If the p-values of both parametric and non-parametic tests (say, t-test and Mann–Whitney U) are on the same side (say, both <0.05), you can give a definite answer. However, if they are inconsitant, you should give a conservative answer. However, what is "the conservative answer" is sistuational, it idoes not always mean "not significant".

Anyway, you are on the right track, no need to worry at the moment.

Dear Radu Bogdan Toma ,

STEM was first conceived as a collective concept by the National Science Foundation in the USA about 30 years ago out of concerns for the quality of undergraduate education , leading to the establishment of Project Kaleidoscope (Elrod, 2010). This and other American funded initiatives have tended to focus on individual teaching enhancements based on the premise that many evidence-based individual improvements will lead to a collective change. However, this has generally not worked out the way these funders originally anticipated.

American interest in STEM education increased rapidly following the publication of Friedman’s (2005) analysis that China and India were on course to overtake the USA in the global economy by surpassing their STEM educational output. Subsequently, other Western countries have followed America’s lead, such as the UK which ran a National HE STEM Programme (2013) from 2009 to 2012. STEM educational reforms are therefore mainly driven by economic rather that pedagogical concerns, leading Fairweather (2008: 6) to describe them as, “solutions in search of a problem”.

References

Elrod, S. (2010) Project Kaleidoscope 2.0: Leadership for twenty-first-century STEM education. Liberal Education, 96(4), pp. 24-33.

Fairweather, J. (2008) Linking evidence and promising practices in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate education. Washington, DC: Board of Science Education, National Research Council, The National Academies.

Friedman, T. (2005) The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

National HE STEM Programme (2013) Enabling the HE sector to engage with schools, enhance curricula, support graduates and develop the workforce, http://www.hestem.ac.uk/.

The optimum blend of lecture and problem based methodology will be more effective as it requires listening and brain stroming.

I have found that the use of structured essays allows me to us problem based learning in a larger class. This helps with on-line classes as well.

In my home country, education assessment and evaluation processes generally include students opinion. This applies to all tutors and teachers.

Two closely related areas offering research and theoretical insights here, I suggest, are those concerning the topics of self-efficacy and of cognitive mindset. Prominent among contributors to the former is Barry J. Zimmerman, and to the latter, Carol Dweck. Mindset theory differentiates learners whose behaviour is governed by a "performance" mjndset (tending towards obtaining social approval for their actions) or, contrastingly, by a "growth" mindset (motivated to seek ways of improving their current knowledge and proficiency level, perhaps beyond accepted educational principles and regardless of social responses). Self-efficacy - strength of one's conviction that one's actions will be, or eventually prove, successful - is seen by Zimmerman to be dependent upon capacity for cognitive self-regulation in learning-situations, that is, one's responsiveness to, and productive use-making of, task-relevant feedback for steering performance and learning. Both perspectives predict that the kind of feedback to which individuals respond in learning-situations - task-relevant versus social - will have a critical impact upon their readiness to participate in them.

Another insightful explanatory perspective is that of ideomotor theory, positing the necessity of being able to couple an appropriate motor-act to a conceptualized intention to achieve a certain, perceived corresponding effect in one's environment. Here, obviously, appropriate motor-acts are those of speech. Ability to participate in a discussion is dependent not merely upon comprehending the subject and immediate interpreting of the content of other participants' utterances (often ones contributed much earlier), both requiring near-instantaneous memory-retrieval, but equally upon alacrity at accessing suitable words for contributing one's own thoughts as well as at converting the accessed words into motor speech sequences. Contributing will obviously be undermined if one has difficulty imagining suitable words or generally in articulating them sequentially (e.g. as per stammerers). In addition, ideomotor theory has spawned extensive research investigating effects of individuals' focus of attention upon their motor performance and rate of improvement. Individuals who tend to focus on imagining the external goal they are intending to attain are found to perform and improve better than those who tend to focus on trying to produce an effective action for attaining it. This general finding, too, may apply as regards proficiency in articulating thoughts in demanding, formal contexts of speaking, e.g. in an academic discussion, in teaching or responding to audience questions during a lecture.

Other potent determinants of self-efficacy include the individual's general background regarding learning-contexts and the opportunities made possible thereby for furthering their proficiency as communicators. The extensive study headed by Bloom (1985) revealed that expert performers had typically received exceptional levels of parental support throughout childhood and adolescence, providing, among other factors, access to highly expert teachers in their domain, frequent experiences of performing to, and with, others, and opportunities for interacting with like peers. All such factors may be reasonably assumed to promote individual's self-efficacy as communicators of their intentions, and would have constituted for them normal phenomena in their ongoing life. By contrast, the less-privileged majority may grow up in a background of indifference towards their personal accomplishments and potential for growth, exposure to teaching-styles that foster dependency on being told what to think and do, and to ridicule from peers and teachers when they fail to deliver what is expected of them. Acquiring proficiency in articulating one's thoughts requires long-term practice and abundant opportunity for learning by trial-and-error that are often prevented in such an upbringing. Given that, readiness to contribute to a tutorial discussion may be influenced more by individuals' personality traits and personal cognitive style as determinants of self-efficacy than by anything else.

I found the best definitions of 3 concepts in InfoSense, a book by noted mathematician Keith Devlin. In short: data=code, information=message and knowledge=action. He provides an example to demonstrate this: grey clouds=code, message=it will rain, action=bring an umbrella

Dear Faraz,

in my experience one important contribution from students comes from their feedback on the PBL experience - see for example this article:

Scholkmann, A. (2017). “What I learn is what I like.” How do students in ICT-supported problem-based learning rate the quality of the learning experience, and how does it relate to the acquisition of competences? Education and Information Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-017-9629-7.

I have alsohad very good experiences with integrationg students' views on PBL by integrating more senior students as PBL--tutors for younger studtends, and discussing their observations and experiences with them.

I've not heard about procedures for students more actively contributing to the PBL-curriculum, for example through submission of PBL-cases. However, I would be thrilled to read about such examples, if there are any!

Kind regards,

Antonia

Thanks Alline for your detailed response and exploring a range of issues. However, I am asking about evidence from research that showed differences in the impact on learning when project-based learning method is used vs. other methods. I am aware of thousands of articles covering each of these methods. Thank you again. Prof S Azer

I agree with the above mentioned answers. dividing the students into smaller groups will help them share their ideas and knowledge and gain more skills about how to work in groups and respect each other's opinions. you need to play the facilitator's role in which you assist the students and provide them with clear instructions and support them in their work so it is more students-centered classroom.

not answer this quest

If I understand your question, you want to use different codes or tags for the same student response.  If that is what you want to do, you can perfectly use as many codes or tags for the same response or text.