Re: the calculus wars, authenticity, etc.

Timothy Koschmann (tkoschmann who-is-at acm.org)
Wed, 26 May 1999 16:03:26 -0500

>With the aid of these examples, I want to make two points. First of all, I
>suspect that PBL is not really that uncommon if you look back through the
>practices of secondary schools (Speaking only from my own experience in my
>own province). However, I believe it has always been regarded by
>knowledgeable teachers as simply another form of project work, but useful
>for different ends. As our technical dept. head put it, in our school at
>least, PBL is understood as a "problem solving" exercise where the stress
>is on the process of "learning how to learn" and also "learning how to
>integrate" various forms of knowing into creating the solution to a
>problem, or the creation of a product (Hence an excellent technique for
>exploring field problems in a medical program, or an educational program, I
>should think). As one of our science teachers put it to me (and I agree
>completely), the disadvantage to PBL is that it is not an efficient way to
>learn and master the highly formal complex theoretical/procedural
>"toolwork" of the disciplines. For that you need some form of more direct
>instruction, be it nothing more than the traditional lecture possibly
>combined with something more interesting like a problem project upon which
>one can experiment with the framework (The kind I mentioned in my earlier
>note).

Without knowing more about these activities, Glenn, I couldn't say how
similar they are to PBL. I will observe, however, that PBL involves more
than simply learning organized around projects (authentic or otherwise).
The method entails modeling a deductive approach to problem solving,
fostering skills for recognizing what (and when) you don't know,
abstracting principles from particularities, and peer- and self-assessment.
It's different in some pretty fundamental ways from traditional methods of
instruction (even those incorporating groupwork activities).

As to PBL not being efficient, this is a frequent refrain we hear in
medical schools from faculty members who argue that it is much more
efficient for them to lecture the students on what they need to know. To
evaluate this argument, however, we need to know what the goal is toward
which we are striving. If the goal is to impart an inventory of facts, to
"cover" a curriculum, they are undoubtedly correct. If the goal is to
foster the development of skills for life-long learning, however, along
with developing an adequate knowledge base, lecturing is not so efficient
afterall. In fact, it de-skills students by depriving them of
opportunities to recognize for themselves when they need to learn
something. Furthermore, we should make a distinction between
discovery-based methods of instruction and student-directed methods like
PBL. PBL students are not expected to re-discover everything that has been
learned, but only to recognize for themselves what they need to learn.
Their discussions leading to these epiphanies should not be viewed as
inefficient or wasteful, but rather as a crucial part of learning all too
often missing in lecture-based instruction.

I acknowledge your other points about the constraints under which teachers
must function. It is all but impossible to implement this kind of teaching
in a bottom-up way in a traditionally-structured school setting---PBL does
not do well in a typical 50-min. class-structured environment, with a
rigidly-structured disciplinary organization. We're always free to dream,
however, and maybe scheme a little bit to find ways of transforming the
system into something that will eventually make teaching like this common
place.
---Tim