About Problem Driven Learning
Problem-driven Learning (PDL) is an educational approach designed to
help students learn content and develop important reasoning skills as
they solve authentic problems in their discipline. While
problem-solving is a commonplace activity in any engineering course,
what makes PDL as an educational approach unique in engineering
education is the kinds of problems the students tackle, the learning
goals and the support system in place to help them achieve those goals.
In a full-blown PDL curriculum, the problems are so complex and require
so many types of knowledge that a single student would be hopelessly
out of her depth in trying to solve one. Teams are required to meet
the problems demands and in these teams students develop new
understandings of collaboration, distributed cognition and points of
view. These authentic problems anchor instruction and learning while
affording free inquiry and self-directed exploration.
The PDL groups are comprised of seven to nine students and learning is
student-centered—the directions the students take, the solution they
reach is determined by the group. The instructor in PDL is a
facilitator, whose primary role is to facilitate learning by asking
questions and encouraging in-depth probing, rather than presenting
facts or information in a didactic manner. The facilitator supports
the group at the process level not the content level. Another form of
support is room where white boards are divided and deployed in such as
way as to scaffold specific reasoning strategies essential to
engineering. Grids are developed during class that support students in
developing a visual database of facts they are uncovering from their
inquiry, hypotheses/models they are deriving as their understanding
grows, assumptions they make as they close the problem space and
inquiry needed to go forward. In each session, which lasts for an hour
and a half, students present findings from their individual
out-of-class inquiry, apply the findings to the problem and identify
new areas of inquiry for the next session. This is done using the
white boards. Individual students take on teaching responsibilities as
they bring new information back to their group and explain its
relevance to the problem. The goals of PDL are to develop students'
critical thinking and reasoning skills and to help them become
self-directed learners who are eventually independent of their
instructors. This results in students who are capable of adaptation,
creativity, and are responsible for life-long learning.
Problem-driven learning is particularly well-suited to the field of
biomedical engineering where the multidisciplinary nature of the field
demands that students develop multidisciplinary skills and knowledge.
They need the modeling and quantitative skills of traditional
engineers, but they also need the systems understanding representative
of a more biological approach. In short, they need to be fully
conversant in two intellectual traditions that are in some ways at odds
with one another. When they work to solve a current problem in the
field, they learn to integrate the methods and knowledge from these two
fields towards reaching a problem solution. For this reason, we find
that PDL provides a learning environment that truly fosters integration
and interdisciplinary thinking.