Through carefully selected and constructed problems, students acquire the range of contextual, biophysical, scientific, social and humanistic knowledge and professional and technical skills needed for competent professional practice. Usually problems are developed with sufficient aspects or subproblems to engage a variety of aspects for analysis, knowledge and skills development and reflection. Be careful to distinguish between PBL which is a whole curriculum approach and problem solving which is a strategy which can be applied in any number of situations. PBL involves problem solving, but much else besides. In Problem Based Learning, the role of both student and teacher is radically different from that of more traditional curriculum models.
Students work in small groups.
They are given a case or trigger with the initial aspects of a problem. This can be a written case, audio or video tape, computer based, simulated patient etc. As questions are posed and answered, students refine their hypotheses and reformulate the problem. They may move through further cycles of information gathering and problem reformulation, gaining information from a range of sources. For the student in a PBL course, the problem precedes and triggers the learning, professional skills and attitudes are incorporated and self directed learning is made possible.