The students assume increasing responsibility for their learning, giving them more motivation and more feelings of accomplishment, setting the pattern for them to become successful life-long learners. The instructor's role becomes one of subject matter expert, resource guide, and task group consultant. This arrangement promotes group processing of information rather than an imparting of information by faculty. The PBL instructor encourages student participation, provides appropriate information to keep students on track, avoids negative feedback, and assumes the role of fellow learner. They are better at activating prior knowledge, learn in a context resembling their future context, and elaborate more fully on the information presented.
Increased elaboration promotes mental processing, understanding, and recall.
In a PBL unit, the ill-structured problem is presented first and serves as the organizing center and context for learning. In the teaching and learning process, information is shared but knowledge is a personal construction of the learner. Thinking is fully articulated and held to strict benchmarks. Assessment is an authentic companion to the problem and process. The PBL unit is not necessarily interdisciplinary in nature but is always integrative.