I felt like I learned more about the topic through a project than doing worksheets. The social studies test at the end of the unit was easy for me. Guess what? I knew more than the test! Our whole class passed the test. We knew the facts but we also learned how to connect those facts and think things through.

In PBL, you get to work with new people and have collaboration. You don’t have to work all alone. It’s not so fun being by your self. Learning about others and what they bring to the group is important. It isn’t always easy to work with everyone, but that’s the real world. The way I see it is this. I might as well learn it all now while I’m still young.
https://www.bie.org/blog/viewpoint_on_pbl_what_students_say

- It typically describe situations or phenomena set in real-life contexts, which require students to explain or resolve the presenting issues

- Problems initiate students’ learning processes, the quality of problems can be postulated to be crucial for students’ learning.
- How to measure of effectiveness of a problem?

-  The extent of correspondence between student-generated and faculty-intended learning issues could be used as a measure of the effectiveness of problems 
Ref: Dolmans, Schmidt, and Gijselaers (1995) 

-  The extent to which the problem leads to the intended learning issues is an important indicator of the problem effectiveness.

-   The functional characteristics of problems are likely to serve as appropriate indicators of problem effectiveness as these characteristics represent the objectives of PBL.

-   Problems stimulating thinking, problems enhancing analysis and reasoning, and problems stimulating self-directed learning can be used to measure the effectiveness of problems.
Characteristics of problems are perceived by students to be associated with good problems

Srinivasan, Malathi MD; Wilkes, Michael MD, PhD; Stevenson, Frazier MD; Nguyen, Thuan MS, MD; Slavin, Stuart MD

Academic Medicine: January 2007 - Volume 82 - Issue 1 - p 74-82
doi: 10.1097/01.ACM.0000249963.93776.aa

I am going to share how we design problems in our institution, as i am medical faculty i am share what we do

we take a case may be any case if respiratory we are teaching we may take case of tuberculosis. Make story of tuberculosis from how the patient present in clinic to prevention and treatment. we divide the story into triggers. while making triggers it is assured that faculties from anatomy, physiology, pathology, microbiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, community medicine plus someone from clinical departments such as internal medicine are there. so that there is no mistake in triggers. While making triggers or problems at the same time we also design tutor guide. The tutor guide covers the learning needs of the students. The learning goals should match with curriculum goals. it should cover the must know area of the topic. In resource limited countries it is sometime difficult to gather all faculties in such condition we take standard text book of medicine and make cases (triggers) and try to cover learning goals of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, microbiology, pathology, pharmacology, community medicine. This is how we design our problems.

After being subjected to the students (ie after PBL block), feedback from students and tutors on the triggers were also obtained. The triggers were then refined based on their feedback. The entire process has been very enriching for all of us. 

Please also find an uploaded schedule of one week PBL session for dental caries above this post. This may help in understanding the process of PBL at our institute.

• Giving the student a sense of ownership of the student assessment process, which improves student motivation to learn

• Encouraging students to be responsible for their own learning, hence developing them as self-learners

• Treating assessment as part of the learning process, where mistakes are opportunities rather than failures

• Practicing the transferable skills needed for life-long learning, especially evaluation skills

• Using external evaluation to provide a model for internal self-assessment of a student's own learning

• Encouraging deep rather than surface learning.

Students need a minimal basic background of their Anatomy, Physiology & Biochemistry, Pharmacology

PBL problem is not a lengthy one it is just a trigger may be to stimulate the group to proceed.

Example: Temporary hemiparesis (trigger)

totally 3 sessions will be involved weekly once say on Wednesday from 8-00 am to 11 am

Students have printed instruction made available

1st session

1. They receive the trigger/problem

2. Select Chairperson/rapportaure

3. Identify the difficult terminlogies & recognise cues

4. Formulate the problem form the trigger and information available (background knowledge, resources etc)

5. List the learning issues and they divide their work

6. Generate hypothesis from problem information and prioritize them.

This needs around 3 hours and they may discuss in groups in their hostels, libraries and again meet the subsequent weekday for 2 nd session and then 3rd sesssion.

It stimulates a deeper learning and the year 1 content shall enable them the normal body structure, function etc.

1.Tutors are important elements in success PBL tutorials.2.Tutor is not authoritarian.3.Tutors should have expertise in group facilitation.4.Tutor should be able to promote critical thinking of students.5.Tutor should be observer , guide and evaluator.

Referances:-

1.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1115096/2.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S18770428090000683.http://srsshodhsansthan.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/13-21.pdf4.https://fhs.mcmaster.ca/facdev/documents/tutorPBL.pdf

PBL eventually spread to other, quite different disciplines, like social work, business, and mass communications. In social work, PBL "is seen as appropriate…because of the breadth of the profession, the various intervention types used by the profession, and social work's integration of values alongside knowledge and skills" (Bolzan and Heycox 194). Though PBL gained a stronghold in medicine, the hard sciences, and the social sciences, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, its presence in the humanities is less palpable, perhaps because of the ways PBL needs to be reimagined in order to fit within the scope of traditional plans of study (Savin-Baden and Howell 20).

Bill Hutchings and Karen O'Rourke advance a similar position. They argue in the journal Arts and Humanities in Higher Education that PBL can be used productively in literary studies, but only when adapted appropriately (Hutchings and O'Rourke 74). Consider that in traditional PBL, students take on a role within their group, and they act in this capacity for the entire tutorial. This aspect of PBL contradicts the spirit of literary studies. In a subsequent book-length study, Hutchings and O'Rourke assert that "literary studies is essentially a[n]…open-ended, critically contested…and creative subject that…encourages [students] to find their own intellectual pathways". Forcing students to select a job or role for the entire PBL process might be "counterproductive to the nature of learning within the discipline" (Savin-Baden and Howell 21).

Despite the difficulties in adapting PBL to certain kinds of literature courses, it seems that PBL could be utilized more easily in the teaching of rhetoric and writing. Indeed, "many writing classes at all levels…place students in different writing situations and ask them to respond to the situation appropriately and effectively" (Miles qtd. in Amador, Miles, and Peters 7).

This study showed that the pre and post PBL meetings had a role in ensuring the quality of our PBL facilitators. They did enhance facilitator comfort and knowledge with the triggers and were productive in improving the triggers. There is a need to assist our facilitators to be more confident about the finer facilitation skills to ensure that PBL as a curriculum delivery tool is an effective one.

A student's perspective on PBL

"PBL alone is not a one-size-fits-all curriculum concept. This has become rather apparent in the lack of a lecture for anatomy. Certain concepts are difficult to grasp from a dense anatomy excerpt; thus, having some form of lecture for subjects such as anatomy can be very helpful in understanding certain concepts."

"A more pressing issue identified was the pacing of sessions. While the session pacing seems comfortable for the majority of my peers, I have observed that students are sometimes left behind figuring out previous problems or ideas either due to not voicing their lack of understanding or by vocalization of a need to press on to cover all relevant parts for a session. However, timing is a delicate issue that likely cannot accommodate every student."

"I have been very satisfied with the decreased emphasis on memorizing minutiae that can be easily searched and the increased emphasis on thinking in various dimensions."

-Here is the link for the analysis of students' performance in pre-PBL and post-PBL exam from the book entitled Advances in Medical Education edited by A.J.J.A. Scherpbier, Cees P.M. van der Vleuten, J.J. Rethans, A.F.W. van der Steeg (2012)

- Pre- and post PBL exams analysis

- stating that the knowledge acquisition is enhanced to better integrate the Biochemistry and clinical information and performance in USMLE in total score significantly improved.

- Pre- and post PBL exams analysis

- stating that the knowledge acquisition is enhanced to better integrate the Biochemistry and clinical information and performance in USMLE in total score significantly improved.

Sadaf Durrani contributed a discussion on the above question:

Time management is an appropriate measure as self-directed learners need to make effective use of their timeline. If students spend too much time in one activity like searching for materials, there may not be enough time for synthesis or productive group input into the PBL.

 In a study by Schmidt, 1993 it was found that PBL students spend far more time in non-scheduled activities related to their problem in contrast to traditional learners who spent their time in educational activities set out by the lecture. Traditional track students use most of the faculty prepared course syllabi, which are teacher directed, they were found to use the library resources less than 4 times a year whereas PBL students were found using almost all library literature on weekly basis. This learning management process added competency in PBL students for information seeking skills. (Evensen DH 2013)

Meta cognition and social factors have a strong influence on PBL.
Problem-based study would cause some dislocation for those used to the traditional system as the inspiration has to be found.

Procedural knowledge, such as written and oral communication skills, teamwork skills, problem-solving skills and self-directed learning skills, and attitudinal knowledge, such as disposition for life-long and self-directed learning, respect for other people’s opinions, ethical behaviour, concern for the community’s welfare and for the environment, are all factors that new PBL students struggle with if they have taken up this approach too early in their learning career.  (Ribeiro 2011)
•Barriers for new PBL students 
 •Coping with missing tutor input and absence of guided discovery styles.

•lack of  torchbearer role i.e. 'teacher'.
•Lack of pre-requisite knowledge of the problem as well as the process of PBL. They are learning about the problem and method at the same time.
•Dealing with the dynamics of the social interactions, immaturity/  unfamiliarity/ absence of certain group members.

References : https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/155f/9924f70bd34c...