Teachers deliver factual content to students who transfer the factual material back to the teacher at the required moment. Objective criteria can be set to establish minimum achievement levels. To teach is taken to mean that the teacher conveys information to students and the teachers decides what to teach, how to organize the subject material, and the means of communicating the material to students. Learning is judged by how well students can report back what the teacher has told them. How students learn is irrelevant in this approach.
Students learn when incoming information can be related to knowledge that is already stored.
The roles of teacher and student are reversible whereby students teach each other, and they teach the teacher, not only about the subject matter, but also about how people learn. Problem-based learning is an example of this approach. A group of students, facilitated by a teacher, determine what knowledge is needed to understand and manage a clinical scenario that typifies an actual clinical case. The group works together to construct the necessary knowledge base. The student-centered approach takes advantage of the fact that new knowledge is acquired by extending and revising prior knowledge, that new ideas acquire meaning when they are presented in relationship to one another, and that knowledge becomes usable when it is acquired in situations where it can be applied to concrete problem solving.