Through carefully designed problems, the PBL process strives to expose students to commonly encountered patient cases, to help students acquire a comprehensive and integrated knowledge base, and to provide a model of expert clinical reasoning. PBL was developed approximately 30 years ago at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada in response to concerns expressed by the academic and health care communities about the educational preparation of new medical graduates. PBL has been applied to medical education and, more recently, to physical therapy education to create competent, autonomous health care practitioners. They stimulate and demand viable hypotheses, critical inquiry, curricular knowledge and skills, and iteration. In a PBL environment, group support, with respect to sharing and evaluation, is expected.
Students collaborate freely to identify learning issues and share information and useful resources.
They are motivated to learn by a need to understand real patient problems. Student driven learning encompasses decisions around knowledge, resources and group dynamics. To facilitate professional autonomy and foster critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills, the tutor should guide the students through the problem identification, analysis and evaluation processes. The goal for the tutor is to create a fluid and transparent interface with the tutorial group through modeling, coaching, and ultimately, fading from the interaction as the students become autonomous. In a world where medical knowledge and technology change almost daily, we cannot afford to merely teach students facts that will soon become outdated.