Discussion Area for INLT Post-IGC Workshop paper on Problem-based learning

read paper - Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment of its purposes, benefits and costs

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Comments / Threads So Far

1. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (from Mick Healey)
   1. re Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (from Sue Vajoczki)
   2. re Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (from Eric Pawson)
2. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (from Steve Gaskin)
3. Comments on Eric Pawson and team Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment of its purposes, benefits and costs (from John Bradbeer)
4. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (from David Higgitt)
5. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (Paul Wright)
6. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (Barbara Gambini)
7. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (Sarah Witham Bednarz)
8. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (Janice Monk)
9. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (Janice Monk)
10. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (Hugh Fletcher)
11. Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs (Michael Solem)

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Mick Healey - University of Gloucestershire, UK
Date: 16 June 2004
Posting: I welcome this cautious balanced review of PBL in geography. I suspect that, as with most forms of teaching and learning, it is not a matter of answering apparently simple questions such as 'Does PBL benefit student learning?', as teasing out under what circumstances do students benefit, by how much, and at what cost. In other words, the answers lie in the specific details and there will be examples of both excellent and poor PBL, just as there are excellent and poor examples of lectures or fieldwork or laboratory classes. Most examples, I suspect will have elements of both and one of the tasks I hope the group will address is begin to tease out the range of combinations of specific circumstances in which the benefits of PBL outweigh the disbenefits. One way in which the group might usefully do this is to evaluate particular case studies of the application of PBL in geography.

What is the difference between inquiry based learning and problem based learning? There strikes me that there is quite a lot of common ground here with the debate on how students may best benefit from research that takes place in their departments (see e.g. my comments on linking teaching and research paper). For example, inquiry based learning, problem based learning and co-learning (the term used by Le Heron et al) may all challenge the traditional power relationships between staff and students in higher education (Healey et al, 2003).

I'm not sure that PBL 'inevitably reifies problem solutions, emphasising the instrumental, the doing, ahead of the thinking, reflection and accommodation.' Surely that depends how we structure the exercise. After all Kolb would suggests that learning takes place by going round his learning cycle (experience, reflection, conceptualisation, and experimentation) several times (Healey and Jenkins, 2000).

References
Healey, M. with Blumhof, J. and Thomas, N. (2003) Linking teaching and research in geography, earth and environmental sciences. Available at: http://www.gees.ac.uk/linktr/linktr.htm#ltringees
Healey, M and Jenkins, A (2000) Learning cycles and learning styles: the application of Kolb's experiential learning model in higher education, Journal of Geography 99, 185-195

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Steve Gaskin - LTSN-GEES / University of Plymouth, UK
Date: 17 June 2004
Posting:I very much enjoyed reading this succinct and objective paper, and I think that the group is well on the way to producing a very interesting piece for JGHE.

I am able to offer the following comments/observations:

· I very much like the introduction about PBL - I think that it provides a clear signpost of where the article is going, and provides the reader with a good conceptual framework.
· I also like the overtness of the paper in highlighting some of the claimed disbenefits of PBL - too often we only write about the good things in learning and teaching, that is, what works. As such, exposing some of the negatives provides a welcome breath of fresh air.
· I also like the range of questions that are posed, as issues which need to be seriously considered/resolved when using PBL with students - the article seems very balanced in terms of 'for' and 'against' this form of teaching.
· You will need to provide the full reference to the INLT learning-styles project that was undertaken at Canterbury.
· It might be useful to provide a list of advantages and disadvantages of a PBL-approach as a table, to break up text.
· Is there any possibility of also providing a list of recommendations to practitioners who might be considering using PBL, based on what you have found? What are the key curriculum issues to consider? I think that this practical ending to the paper might be received well. It would provide some more concrete signposts, in an area of teaching that seems to lack significant critical evaluation. However, I appreciate that this might be difficult, given the scarcity of critical and evidence-based literature in the PBL area.

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Comments on Eric Pawson and team Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment of its purposes, benefits and costs
From: John Bradbeer - University of Portsmouth, UK
Date: 7 July 2004
Posting: I found the paper most interesting and thought provoking. I hope that it will stimulate geographers to explore thoroughly what I feel is one of the more exciting developments in learning and teaching. My comments are to some extent a dialogue with the paper and I would not suggest that there is any ranking in the order with which I raise issues.

Eric tries to deal with the really quite vexed issue of defining problem-based learning (PBL). Normally I am not too keen to fix a definition and I am usually happy with a degree of ambiguity or contestation. With PBL, I feel that we do need to know what people mean when they use the term as there are lots of variations and some variants purporting to be PBL are not really PBL at all. Later in the paper Eric talks of the evaluation of PBL and this literature is bedevilled by the great variety of things counted as PBL and so the lack of consensus revealed probably just means that if you treat the incommensurable as comparable you get iffy results. I think that PBL is really a way of learning. I would stress that it is a process rather than a structure. However, structural characteristics are important and in some cases the structures will subvert or obstruct the intended PBL processes.

I think that Eric's paper probably underplays two important characteristics of PBL. First, it is synthetic and endeavours to be interdisciplinary. In medicine, the idea was to bring the relevant anatomy, physiology, biochemistry etc together in a focus on the patient as a person. Pre-PBL approaches could be caricatured as the physiologists starting with the brain and the anatomists starting with the toes and meeting accidentally in the lower bowel! Now, I would have thought that the appeal of PBL to geography as a discipline ultimately concerned with an integrated and interdisciplinary approach was pretty strong. The second characteristic of PBL is the synthesis between theory and practice. Again in medicine, pre PBL approaches had (usually) two pre-clinical years of lectures and then clinical placement with the students struggling to make connections between book and lecture learning and the messy reality of actual patients presenting with complex and confusing symptoms. Geography has usually tried to present itself as a discipline that does things as well as contemplates things. What worried me in my last years in a geography department was the inability of students to apply book and lecture knowledge in real situations. Fieldwork was often a rude awakening for both staff and students and just one week of fieldwork does not really shift the balance.

An issue that I feel is crucial to the implementation of PBL is whether it will become the curriculum for an entire semester, year, or even whole degree or just be confined to a few individual modules or courses. I was never able to get more than grudging acceptance of PBL as something I did in one module in one semester. It did mean that I could do PBL without carrying my colleagues with me. What it meant for my students was confusion. PBL is a radically different experience and I guess that it took even the more enthusiastic about a month to come to terms with PBL, by which time they were 40% through the module. Others simply hated the apparent lack of structure, the absence of a good set of lecture notes, the need to read widely, the need to work in groups and what they saw as the excessive work load of producing a portfolio. The evaluation by students of my experiments in PBL was pretty negative, but the issues raised were comparative ones. They really could coast in other modules. In one sense, the merging of previously separate modules would ease this problem of comparability.

There are huge issues in staff development associated with a significant move to PBL (say going for a whole semester or a whole year delivered through PBL). Now, there are some good materials on effective tutor facilitation in PBL and it should not be too hard for staff teams together with local educational and staff developers to develop initial training sessions and to hold regular reflection and review sessions. Also I like to think that the heart of the PBL learning process is really like creative and imaginative research. So staff ought to be sympathetic to the approach. I concede readily that a PBL tutor needs a good range of inter-personal skills and a fairly flexible and self-effacing approach but John Heron's work on facilitation is an excellent guide.

Eric's paper appears to endorse the claim that PBL reifies problem solutions. It does not. But my experience of working with students inexperienced and ill at ease in PBL suggests that this is a real pathology and it is something that the PBL tutor needs constantly to guard against. PBL is really about the processes of problem formulation, of selective research and the testing of knowledge against reality. Sometimes the learning will be that this is an intractable problem. PBL scenarios involving public policy decisions can be most effective ways of giving cynical and apathetic students more sympathy with politicians! Again, my recent experience with geography students was that at dissertation time they could not formulate useful and feasible problems to study. They either were prematurely narrow and technocratic or else hopelessly vague and grand in scale. I would like to think that PBL would help students in problem formulation.

Eric makes reference to the recent INLT learning styles project (Bradbeer, Healey & Kneale 2004). As the lead author, I would like to comment that two things struck me about the student conceptions of geography. First was that the fact that so many saw geography as a body of knowledge and not as a way of thinking. Secondly, that many saw geography as divided and not as a synthetic whole. So this represents a double challenge to PBL. PBL is synthetic yet many of our students seem to see several distinct geographies (or a 'don't bother me with that, I'm a human/physical geographer' mentality). PBL also is about doing and not just about knowing. Geography students do not appear to see their subject as having much if any methodological dimension.

The paper claims that very little critical evaluation of PBL has emerged. I guess that this is correct of PBL outside of medicine and nursing. But for these disciplines, I would argue that much of the literature is critical (in the narrow sense of trying to rubbish PBL). As I said earlier, this literature is plagued by the problems of so many different forms of PBL being treated as a uniform phenomenon. There is also the question of evaluation methodologies. Classic medical studies like to use the size effect. To start with there are arguments about a statistically significant size effect and then there is the whole question of suitability. This approach is probably justified for randomised control trials of drugs and treatments but it does not work for educational innovations. There are more than a few echoes of the current debates about evidence based practice in education.

My apologies for writing at some length and not for producing a piece fully referenced. I would like to thank Eric and his team for the paper and hope that this will start the ball rolling for PBL in geography. Finally, could I please plug the work of Maggi Savin-Baden? My one concession to formal academic practice will be to list her main work.

Bibliography

Bradbeer, J, Healey, M, & Kneale, P (2004) Undergraduate geographers' understandings of geography, learning and teaching: a phenomenographic study. Journal of Geography in Higher Education. 28(1) 17-34.
Savin-Baden, M (2000) Problem-Based Learning in Higher Education: Untold Stories. Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education/Open University Press.
Savin-Baden, M (2003) Facilitating Problem-Based Learning: Illuminating Perspectives. Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education/Open University Press.
Savin-Baden, M (2004) Understanding the impact of assessment on students in problem-based learning. Innovations in Education and Teaching International. 41(2) 223-233.
Savin-Baden, M & Major, C M (2004, forthcoming) Foundations of Problem-Based Learning. Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education/Open University Press.
Savin-Baden, M & Wilkie, K (eds) (2004, forthcoming) Challenging Research in Problem-Based Learning. Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education/Open University Press.

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: David Higgitt - National University of Singapore
Date: 9 July 2004
Posting:Eric Pawson and his team have provided a well balanced introduction to PBL and posed a number of questions which will hopefully receive some attention on the list and in Glasgow. I have three broad comments.

PBL and judging success
It seems almost inevitable that academics who are prepared to put aside time writing about an educational initiative are going to say something positive about the experience. It is something of an Achilles’ heel in pedagogic writing that assessment of the real value of an instructional method or educational ethos rarely goes beyond student evaluation. Hence the concluding comment that the literature is full of alleged advantages and limited on unsuccessful scenarios. A question that arises is how might a pedagogic project set out to determine whether a PBL approach was successful and on what criteria would success be measured?

Curriculum versus modules
A tension is identified between the individual and the collective view of pedagogy, one wishing to be innovative and radical, the other more conservative. It seems that in the spirit of Quality Audits where departments have begun (or at least been encouraged) to think in a joined-up way about the skills and learning outcomes delivered by their respective programmes, the idiosyncrasies about individual modules come under the spotlight and a more coherent curriculum evolves. Ironically, it would appear that PBL is practiced by individuals within Geography and tolerated rather than embraced by curriculum design. In the engineering and medical programmes referred to by the paper there is more evidence of a corporate ethos of PBL. As John Bradbeer’s comments indicate, running PBL in isolation without the co-operation of colleagues and where students are used to a very different style of teaching is likely to be counter-productive. Are there occasions where PBL can be fully accepted by colleagues and students alike? Perhaps fieldwork modules are one example. Fieldwork has sometime been criticized for not being integrated into the core sufficiently but perhaps it is that separation that encourages staff to try things differently in field contexts. This may in part reflect assessment modes. The nebulous nature of PBL can cause assessment anxiety and when the activity is isolated (in comparison to more conventional content-driven courses) this can be problematic. Perhaps the team can address the issue of ideal PBL-integrated curriculum design.

Role of Technology
There is some discussion about GIS within the paper but relatively little attention is given to the possibilities of PBL opening up with computer technology. My university instructional technology unit today sent me information about a new application that can be used to bolt on interactivity with recorded voice and video onto web presentations. Part of me is thinking that I can create some PBL applications to run in the week that I am attending IGC (our semester starts in August). With Virtual Learning Environments, Discussion Boards, web resources and databases within easy reach shouldn’t this make PBL more viable?

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Paul Wright - Southampton Institute, UK
Date: 12 July 2004
Posting:This paper encourages me! I assumed that the integrated, messy, real world nature of problems would lend itself to geography/environmental subjects, but was amazed on doing a trawl of the internet to find out that this might not be true. At least this paper suggests that those of us who do extol PBL?s virtues need to be more scholarly in doing so, which I would support, and that good work is ongoing.

A few points came to mind as I was reading the paper, and the comments already posted:

1. Plaudits are heaped upon PBL for developing skills not often explicitly raised in other more traditional curriculum. The "learning to learn" brigade wins the argument then? Well, not quite. One of the key issues with my own PBL work is that students need a skill set already to hand before they can enter the dark, cluttered world of environmental problems. Perhaps students from top universities already have these? Perhaps they are self-starters before they start? Perhaps their pre-HE grades reflect this, and so these skills need no honing as they start their PBL exercises?

So, my question is does PBL sit uncomfortably with students with non-traditional educational backgrounds, who enter HE as part of a widening participation strategy? My feeling is that we constantly fail many of these students if we ignore the skills needed to engage with PBL before they start it. Colleagues in other departments at my institution, who also practice PBL, would concur with this. If we do not address this issue, will students who succeed at PBL only be highly bright and articulate individuals? And if so, does this correlate with examples of the positive impact of PBL coming from areas and departments where one might expect such individuals to reside e.g. medicine?

2. Additionally, evaluation of my own PBL exercises suggest that whilst students seem to enjoy doing it, they hate being assessed in it. Partly, I think this is due to the factors mentioned above, and, partly, I think that the open ended, messiness of it all worries them a great deal.

What I think I have noticed is that students try to subvert the process. Biggs argues that PBL is an excellent technique for moving students from structural knowledge into the extended abstract, where relational knowledge is brought to bear onto a new context (the problem). What many students appear to do is, in the face of a worry about the process, stick to whatthey know best. As someone has suggested, this means doing what they are used to and researching the context like mad, and then solving the problem. Is it me, or does this sound counterintuitive? Moreover, what they then concentrate on is trying to solve the problem rather than concentrate on the process by which they do this. Thus assessments are very often unreflective and product driven. It is almost as if they are jumping up and saying "Look at all this! I've learned it!" and giving me a list of unconnected facts to evidence that. However, we would say that the evidence of deep learning is in the ability to take the bricks, know how to piece them together, try to build the house, and understand why bits fall down, rather than trying to build something without first engaging with the materials!

I accept that stronger facilitation might help here. Mea Culpa! However, it is clear from verbal feedback that the reasons why many students fall back on this tactic is that it is familiar and successful elsewhere. As has already been suggested, bucking this trend puts the students in unknown territory, making them unsure of their academic surroundings, worried about their assessment, and often critical of the technique. In the end, they do not appear to like doing something different, especially if what they have always done seems to work elsewhere. So, can PBL only be truly successful where it is an extensive part of the curriculum?

3. Finally, there seems to be a strong need for staff development. In many ways, students are merely mirrors of us teachers. One of the reasons why students seem ill at ease with PBL is that staff seem unsure about it too. Am I the only PBL practitioner who questions whether they have got things right? Whilst I argue above for a new set of a priori skills to be inculcated within the student body, it is evident that similar development is needed for teachers. We need, therefore, to see ourselves more as guides on a journey rather than keepers of knowledge.

Moreover, there needs to be a wider cultural and philosophical acceptance of PBL within faculties to reap many of the benefits suggested in the literature. Such acceptance would probably lead to a wider uptake and use of the method, therefore not making the experience so alien to students. Also, a wider use of PBL might finally cause teaching staff to more thoroughly acknowledge the skills gap in many students. I suggest that this is crucial, as it appears that islands of good practice are in fear of being swamped by a tide of student complaints and staff cynicism.

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Barbara Gambini - University of Urbino (Italy)
Date: 20 July 2004
Posting:I read the contribution and following comments with great interest, and appreciated the broad and critical examining of several questions implied in PBL- some of which had never occurred to me. Here are some questions that I would like to share with you.

When I read that “It has also been claimed that PBL treats uncertainty and plurality as obstacles because it fundamentally conceives of life as problem-governed”, I could not help wondering: are we talking about the same thing here?

I assumed that PBL precisely aims to teach how to work one’s way out of complexity without the ready-made, somewhat reductionist approach inherent in traditional problem solving methods. That, being student-centred, it tends to admit a plurality of approaches and “solutions”.

I see PBL as a way to learn to: utilise acquired knowledge to formulate “the right” questions and look for further relevant information/skills; learn how to activate prior knowledge and skills even without explicit signals; engage in a regular reflection on one’s learning style, identify possible repetitive patterns, both positive and negative, and work on acquiring more versatile and flexible learning strategies.

Sue Vajoczki has explained the difference between inquiry learning and PBL – which I did not know. I have recently visited a democratic school (Sudbury school) in Australia. Can democratic schooling be considered inquiry learning par excellence, and PBL “democratic” in pathway selection and more structured and guided as to the issue, if not the solution?

Democratic schooling must be accompanied by democratic parenting to be truly efficacious, I was told. Can PBL be successful as an occasional experiment in an otherwise traditional learning environment, or is there a chance that the students may be confused and feel some sort of schizophrenia?

Does PBL have to occur in groups, or can it be introduced as an individual practice, at least in the initial phases?

Is there room in academic life for PBL (or anything) with no assessment, or self-assessment only, to minimise the risks that Paul Wright describes? Does PBL require “a skill set ready to hand” in order to be efficacious or – simply- in order not to be too frustrating for both teachers and students?

Can we say that in traditional learning strategies the teacher knows where the students will end up, and more or less through what itinerary, and with PBL the teacher does not, and that this may legitimately scare her/him?

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Sarah Witham Bednarz (Texas A&M University, USA)
Date: 20 July 2004
Posting:In his initial paper, Pawson et al. ask whether GIS can be taught using PBL. I draw readers attention to the November/December issue of the Journal of Geography which contains two pieces of research on using PBL to teach GIS, one in the context of middle school science students (13-14 year olds) and one on using it to teach teachers to use GIS. The results in both cases were successful. I think alot of it has to do with issues related to transfer in the GIS context. It is difficult for
students to apply and transfer what they learn in lecture and lab to real world settings without some sort of explicit practice like that offered by PBL (or at the least some sort of project.) PBL is not panacea, but in some instances it is a very effective way to structure student learning, especially where students are learning to integrate declarative, conditional, and procedural knowledge.

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Janice Monk (University of Arizona, USA)
Date: 23 July 2004
Posting: With the PBL paper, I would like to see at least one or two examples (or hypothetical examples) inserted, perhaps as a box, so that it is clear how the definition is implemented.

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Janice Monk (University of Arizona, USA)
Date: 25 July 2004
Posting: As I work my way through the papers, I am struck by the extent to which the issue of the changing context of higher education in relation to the state,permeates or at least is raised, across most pieces. Perhaps we should have some space for reflection on the cross-cutting themes, as well as discussion of individual papers.

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Hugh Fletcher (Biology and Biochemistry - Queen's University of Belfast, UK)
Date: 4 August 2004
Posting: My personal experience of PBL was the most important thing I learned at university. In my fifth week as a UG I discovered that I/we did not need to be told everything, we could, and indeed were expected, to think for ourselves. Not only that, but where the answer was not known, we could construct hypotheses and design experimental tests on a par with the experts, our lecturers, obviously within the confines of our knowledge. I still remember the questions 35 years later.

The important learning event was not the solution to the problem, but the change of mindset.

The problems came in small tutorial groups, 1 hr. a week for 4 weeks, repeated 4 times throughout the first year. So little but so important. Modularisation stopped that, of course. It was the impact of the technique on the rest of the courses that was important, not the time spent on one problem.

As a means of teaching knowledge I suspect it is too slow, but perhaps we should question the value of teaching subjects to students who won't employ that knowledge in future.

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Comments on Problem-based learning in geography: towards a critical assessment if its purposes, benefits and costs
From: Michael Solem - Association of American Geographers
Date: 6 August 2004
Posting: This topic overlaps in interesting ways with some of the other topics, particularly employability and linking teaching and research. What have been some of the more compelling studies assessing the value of problem-based learning for teaching skills valued in the workforce and/or research laboratory?

It seems that problem-based learning would help foster social skills (e.g.,
collaboration) and applications of disciplinary knowledge, thereby illustrating the value of a discipline in the workplace and to basic research. This is not a new idea; John Dewey's educational philosophy of pragmatism emphasized linkages between education and society at-large. How does PBL relate to the writings of educational philosophers in other countries?