PBL: Future Challenges for Educational Practice and Research.

Problem based approaches to learning have a long history of advocating experience based education. Psychological research and theory suggests that, by having students learn through the experience of solving problems, they can learn both content and thinking strategies. Problem Based Learning (PBL) is an Instructional method in which students learn through facilitated problem solving. In PBL, student learning centres on a complex problem, that does not have a single correct answer. Students work in collaborative groups to identify what they need to learn in order to solve a problem. They engage in Self Directed Learning (SDL) and then apply their new knowledge to the problem and reflect on what they learned and the effectiveness of the strategies employed. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that, PBL has the potential to prepare students more effectively for future learning because it is based on four modern insights into learning such as Constructive, Self-Directed, Collaborative and Contextual. In addition, available research is reviewed and solutions for educational practices are described.