There must be something compellingly effective about problem-based learning, given the level of faculty interest in it all through higher education. After all, no one thinks it's easier or takes less time. And, as with almost every other change in teaching, students resist it, at least at first. Why, then, have medical and professional schools embraced it so enthusiastically? Why has the Pew Charitable Trusts given over $ 600,000 to the University of Delaware and a similar grant to Samford University in Alabama to investigate restructuring traditional instruction along problem-based lines?

What It DoesThe list of reasons includes the fact that problem-based learning (PBL) ends up orienting students toward meaning-making over fact-collecting. They learn via contextualized problem sets and situations. Because of that, and all that goes with that, namely the dynamics of group work and independent investigation, they achieve higher levels of comprehension, develop more learning and knowledge-forming skills and more social skills as well. This approach to teaching brings prior knowledge into play more rapidly and ends up fostering learning that adapts to new situations and related domains as quickly and with the same joyous magic as a stone skipped over a body of water.

What It IsIn some ways what PBL is seems self-evident: it's learning that results from working with problems. Official descriptions generally describe it as "an instructional strategy in which students confront contextualized, ill-structured problems and strive to find meaningful solutions." But where does it fit compared with all the other "learnings" faculty hear about - "cooperative learning, "" collaborative learning, "and" active learning "? The proliferation of "learnings" and their attendant partisan camps invites the reawakening of long-standing faculty prejudice against educational fads and "methods." Even so, interest in PBL grows because not only does research show a higher quality of learning (though not a greater amount if "amount" equates with the number of facts), but problem-based learning simply feels right intuitively. It seems to reflect the way the mind actually works, not a set of parlor-game procedures for manipulating students into learningThus, seen as a reification of cognitive processes, in a problem-based approach teaching and learning at last seem like two sides of one coin, not something done by one group to another, and faculty instinctively feel the intellectual commonalities between research and teaching, between their own intellectual lives and their role in the intellectual lives of students.

John Cavanaugh, vice-provost for Academic Programs and Planning at Delaware and principle investigator on the Pew grant, sorts out the place of PBL among the "learnings" this way: "Imagine a family tree: Active Learning would be at the top. Cooperative / Collaborative would be a subset of that, and I see PBL as a subset of Coop / Collab based on cases. All forms of group work don't center on cases; problem-based groups do. "

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