PBL - Alive and Kicking after 50 years!?
In December 2019, the scientific journal Advances in Health Sciences Education (Vol. 24(5)) published a special issue titled Celebrating Fifty Years of Problem Based Learning. Problem and project based learning (PBL) have been around for half a century, and as evidenced in this special issue, the heated discussion on its pros and cons is still ongoing – although its form has changed.
Some researchers argue that PBL is doomed to fail because it provides minimal guidance to students. Others state that it is overly structured and does not help students to develop self-directed learning skills. Both sides have strong theoretical and empirical arguments, although they often refer to PBL implementations that are markedly different from each other, ranging from unguided discovery learning to the strongly guided Maastricht seven-jump to PBL. What becomes evident in this special issue is that approaches to PBL are becoming more and more flexible, with implementations that increasingly take the context, the learning domain and the prior knowledge of students into account. For example, first-year students might be working on paper-based problems under direct guidance of a tutor, while fourth-year students in the same program might be working on much more complex real-life problems with supervision at a distance. This insight also changes the discussion on the pros and cons of PBL. The question is no longer, whether PBL works, but under which conditions and for which goals specific implementations of PBL work. If you want to be involved in this ongoing discussion on the value of PBL, you might want to visit this year’s Pan PBL conference in Denmark, where Aalborg is famous for its system of project-based learning (see http://pbl2020.panpbl.org/). Or participate in our SHE’s innovative online course Problem and Project Based Learning – A Critical Appraisal of the latest research in PBL. You can find more information on our website.
50yrs PBL: Forever young! Read more about its successes, struggles and new avenues in the special issue in Advances in Health Sciences Education, Volume 24 Number 5, 2019.
Read the editorial: Celebrating 50 years of problem-based learning: progress, pitfalls and possibilities via https://bit.ly/35uDc22
Read more about lessons learnt from Mc Master, how theory can inform practice and research, PBL in Asia, assessment, motivation, key perspectives in meta-analysis and reviews, and dominant and marginalized perspectives in the globalization of PBL; many of the papers are open access papers.
Jeroen van Merrienboer