FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Question:  Our board meeting went well, though I think many are skeptical about the PBL method. Many mentioned content knowledge deficits of teachers and the need to remedy that. How have you defended it against the critics who say that teachers need more content knowledge? My understanding of your program is that you have summer institutes during which the teachers learn the content, by using PBL methods, from experts in the field (like the professor who studies the sun that you told me about on the phone).

The questions that you raised are important issues, the following is my response:

As to your concern that the subject knowledge deficiency the PBL participants have may hinder their learning through PBL. Some of the teachers working with us have very limited science knowledge.  They have used the cases to investigate every possible learning need that the PBL case writers thought of when the cases were constructed. The problem with limited background knowledge is that it may affect some parts of this process, but eventually that will be resolved.  The learning needs guide students to conduct research, study, read and peer-teach to strengthen their knowledge; crucial components that usually have been neglected by people who do only an unstructured inquiry approach kind of instruction.

At CCMB, PBL students meet with a facilitator three mornings and during the three afternoons, they have to conduct research and self-study or seek information from content experts. After digesting what they found in their self-selected study areas (the other two mornings of the week are non-mentored PBL sessions) they "peer-teach" what each one of them found in their own study time. Group members will monitor each other's contribution, and when one of them is not doing their job in serious study/research, the rest of the group will not allow that to continue to happen because they don’t want to risk their own learning. ( Testing is done on an individual basis, the group is not graded as an entity)

In addition, a PBL case is usually vague in its nature!  Just looking at a case to judge what can come out from it is not ideal. The key to serious learning is embedded in the process. The facilitator's role is very very very important (I can't stress more how important a PBL facilitator is in terms of the PBL approach). If the facilitator really uses the right questions to guide the group discussion and pushes them to generate lots of hypotheses (ideas), then, the kind of critical thinking utilizing available information can really lead to very specific learning needs. At the beginning of the PBL process, students usually have no content background knowledge at all, and they really have a limited amount of skills to perform critical thinking (critical thinking requires "substance," meaning background knowledge).  When the learner does not have the kind of knowledge to "reflect on" and make "links" between pieces of knowledge, the thinking will be naive and the learning needs they generate will be very broad. Our first year students usually will come up with learning needs like "cancer" or "human anatomy", both are one whole semester of study subjects in the traditional program. They don't know that such learning needs are impossible to fulfill unless they; (a) have been exposed to the subjects before; (b) have actually tried to conduct research in only 12 hours and been frustrated. They usually come back frustrated, and report to the facilitator that the topic is too big to master, the facilitator will then help them to think about how the knowledge they have gained in the past 12 hours contributed to the case. At this point they can really do some reading. (With this new information, their ideas will be more refined and their learning needs will be more specific!). This is the same scenario that happens to science teachers and their students!
 

 Question:  Another question I had was about evaluation of your K-12 students who've gone through the program.   I know you have data on your dental school students, and that it indicates that the methods of PBL are working, but have you done any long-term studies on the success of the students in your Orchid and Octopus projects? Success in the broadest of senses -- test scores, but also admittance to colleges & jobs, interest in pursuing science for a career, etc.
 
We have only worked with these teachers for three years, we have not collected any long-term information from them yet.  But there are case studies from some of our lead teachers that can provide you information of students' learning and attitude issues.  In addition, out funding source has been minimal so there are many things that we would like to pursue in the areas of research on student outcomes, more extensive professional development and in-classroom research.
Teachers DO need more training and preparation in content knowledge, in an article that was just published in the Michigan Science Teacher Journal, we wrote that the analysis from TIMSS's 41 countries shows that one implication of the findings is that our teachers are handicapped for serious science teaching. The system does not have an agreement on what the essential learning subjects are in science, everything is splintered, textbooks, assessment instruments, state standards documents. Policy changes at such a pace that one innovation is not implemented completely enough to see the effect, before the next innovation has arrived to "kill" the previous one. And so it goes back and forth, educational reform is a "fashionable nonsense" for most our teachers.

They begin to recognize the pattern and continue doing what they are doing no matter what the changes are. Now with the standards movement, teachers are held accountable for serious teaching, but they still fail (most of the mathematics teachers participating in TIMSS have known the NCTM and yet, their students still did poorly) because they don't really have the subject knowledge to teach quality math or science. This goes back to the splintered system we have that there is no impact from the efforts of the schools of education to prepare quality science teachers, and no quality K-12 science environment so that people lose interest in science before high school.

But, that went too far from our discussion of PBL. I just want to say that we found that these science teachers have increased their knowledge and interest in science after being with us. What I am more concerned with is the time issue.  We don't really have the luxury to have them for an extensive time period. Basically, the PBL cases should have study, research, experiment and other critical components built-in in order for them to really master what they identify as learning needs. Science teachers are parents, husbands and wives, as well as teachers, in addition to participating in the institutes.  Unless you have an assessment system in place to find out how much they have learned; and the learning result is linked to some kind of incentive (helping them to achieve better scientific content and process skills in addition to their crazy life) you will see only a limited increase in the amount of content knowledge and process skills. That will not be enough to cause a paradigm shift from being a traditional teacher to a PBL teacher; (a) they have not seen the whole process nor experienced enough growth in themselves to buy into the fact that the PBL approach can actually increase subject knowledge; (b) they have not conducted more self-reading and learning to master the PBL approach and consequently they are afraid of writing the cases or being a facilitator.

Hope this will help.

HsingChi Wang, Ph.D.
 and Patricia Thompson

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