Strategies for Facilitating PBL in the Middle School Classroom by Dr. Peggy Ertmer

I did not know much about Problem-Based Learning (PBL) before, but it seems that it is a very strong method. I appreciate Dr. Ertmer's presentation, which was my initial experience to get to know about this methodology.

PBL seems to be the method that gives students case studies to solve authentic problems collaboratively using resources available in the community or via web under the facilitation of the instructor.

I was wondering what types of theoretical background behind it. It seems that it is a combination of Situated Learning Theory (Participating in or involving considerations of the community, resource available in the community via computer, problem-solving) and Constructivism (collaborative learning, teacher as a facilitator). I would like to make literature research on this question. It seems to me that PBL might be very similar to Anchored Instruction too.

I was also intrigued by Dr. Schaffer’s question regarding Service-Learning because I thought SL is also similar to PBL in many senses. Service-Learning itself does not advocate problem-solving. But in many cases, it requires students to solve emergent problems to say the least. SL does not require collaboration. But collaboration seems to be common in SL too. The biggest similarities between the two are authentic activities and the difficulty of assessment. I would like to talk about assessment further.

In SL, it is difficult to assess students’ understanding, appreciation, and value that come with community work. I discuss the difficulty of assessment for PBL below.

Was the assessment really valid in the case study? Students were given multiple-choice questions test (for pre and post tests). But, it seems to be that PBL may not be compatible with this test format. Problem-solving ability may not be measured by the use of such format. However, as Dr. Ertmer said, multiple-choice questions can measure the content knowledge that students acquired. I thought it might be a good study to measure correlations between what can be measured by multiple-choice question format and what problem-solving ability can be measured by another test format. (In order to measure problem-solving ability, I think transfering is a big part of it.) Such research could have been done by some other researchers, and maybe it was assumed in the presentation.

Shigetake