Five case studies detail teachers and professors who use a real-world problem as the basis for planning and implementing a comprehensive unit of authentic learning experiences aligned with academic content standards, instructed with high levels of rigor, and assessed authentically to determine the extent to which students mastered the standards. The text details how the instructor works with students to identify a meaningful problem, aligns appropriate work products to standards and instructional activities, and adapts the plan to address varying student learning needs. A mixed methods approach used student achievement data, student and teacher interviews, and a student survey. Increases were seen in students' self-efficacy, as well as their abilities to collaborate, communicate both verbally and in writing, engage in higher order thinking, conduct research, apply knowledge to novel circumstances, justify opinions, and assume leadership roles.
TopIntroduction
Effectively engaging all students in the learning process is a challenge all teachers and professors face. The students in present-day classrooms are bombarded with technology at concentrations previously unimaginable to their instructors. Social media, video games, streaming video, artificial intelligence – the list is lengthy of ways technology distracts (and sometimes engages) learners. The age-old question, “when am I ever going to need to use this in the real world” persists in classrooms with even the youngest learners. Academic deficits cause many students to lack efficacy for their likelihood of success. Problems with personal organization, time management, goal setting, and large class sizes also contribute to lack of engagement for many learners. The present study was designed to determine whether the use of real-world problems as the basis for teaching and learning could overcome some or all these obstacles to student engagement and success. Using five different classrooms from the elementary school, middle school, high school, and university continuum, the present study set out to determine whether and how the use of real-world problems could increase student engagement. The researcher’s aim was to outline how the instructors planned and implemented instruction that impactfully engaged students.
The following two research questions were explored:
- 1)
To what extent do teachers using real-world problems believe and have evidence to support the belief that such approaches improve student academic outcomes?
- 2)
What are student perceptions about any benefits of teachers using an authentic real-world problem as a teaching and learning tool?
TopBrief Review Of Literature
Arguably, Problem-Based Learning (PBL) can be traced back to John Dewey who posited:” To organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the doing requires observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of a constructive imagination, is what needs to be done to improve social conditions” (Dewey 1916, 1944, p. 137). Dewey also theorized that, “Methods which are permanently successful in formal education go back to the type of situation which causes reflection out of school in ordinary life. They give pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results” (Dewey 1916, 1944, p. 154).
Using Dewey’s foundational logic, Howard Barrows, chief of medical education at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, strove to create more meaningful teaching and learning experiences that allowed medical school students to make connections to their personal lives and the coursework they were taking. Barrows identified the purpose of medical education as “to produce doctors capable of managing health problems of those who seek their services, in a competent and humane way. To do this, the doctors . . . must have both knowledge and the ability to use it” (Barrows 1985, p. 3).
Though typical medical schools focused on imparting knowledge, Barrows viewed this as only one of three critical and interdependent qualities of effective medical education: “ (1) an essential body of knowledge, (2) the ability to use knowledge effectively in the evaluation and care of patients' health problems, and (3) the ability to extend or improve that knowledge and to provide appropriate care for future problems which they must face” (Barrows 1985, p. 3).
Barrows developed problem-based learning to “allow [medical] students to integrate, use, and reuse newly learned information in the context of patients' problems; the symptoms, signs, laboratory data, course of illness, etc., provide cues for retrieval in the clinical context” (Barrows 1985, p. 5).
Robert Delisle tell us that, “Barrows designed a series of problems that went beyond conventional case studies. He didn't give students all the information but required them to research a situation, develop appropriate questions, and produce their own plan to solve the problem. This cultivated students' “clinical reasoning process” as well as their understanding of the tools at their disposal.” (Delisle p. 24).