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School Board Journal
November / December 1995
January / February 1996

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Students learn more when they're
required to solve problems

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Students are more likely to be enthusiastic about learning and to remember what they've learned when they're asked to solve problems.

That's the concept of Problem-Based Learning (PBL), which calls for students in grades K-12 to engage in self-directed learning by studying real-life situations. Teachers rather than serving as the main source of knowledge coordinate the gathering of information from a range of sources.

Students forget much of what they've been taught through traditional instructional methods, such as teacher lectures, reading, or memorizing. They're more likely to retain the information when they've discovered it on their own, says Howard Barrows, professor and chairman of medical education at Southern Illinois University's (SIU) School of Medicine.

Barrows developed PBL more than 20 years ago for medical students and began introducing it to high school science classes in the early 1980s. He is the project director of the PBL Institute at Lanphier High School in Springfield, which trains teachers in the PBL method.

To be truly effective. PBL should begin in elementary school, says Mildred Jackson, a PBL consultant who retired from teaching in 1994. "Children begin to talk out in kindergarten," she says. "Give them something constructive to talk about."

Students at Westgate Elementary in Arlington Heights, for example, are asked to figure out how to keep take-out hamburgers warm until the customer gets home and how to find the owner of a cockatiel seen on the playground, says Principal Emily Alford.

She says teachers found it easy to create PBL problems for their students. "These elementary students are so hungry and eager."

Examples of PBL exercises for high school students include the following:

• Math students are told their school needs a new roof. They must find out what materials are needed, how much they will cost, and what the school's tax-exempt status will mean to the price of building supplies.

• Students in a geometry class wrestle with the number of squares it takes to construct an early American quilt.

• Ninth-grade English students write their own children's stories, comparing favorite classics with those written today and mastering the concepts of theme, plot, and point of view.

• Students in a sociology class explore inequities in state funding for public education by comparing an affluent school district with a poor one.

Because the project is new, it is too early to measure its results. But research on medical students has shown that PBL students demonstrated more comprehensive understanding of information, better retention of knowledge, and more effective problem-solving techniques than those in the traditional medical curriculum.

According to Lanphier science and chemistry teacher Diana Roth, PBL works especially well for underachievers. "The chips on their shoulders just fall away." But, she says, honor students "need to learn how to think, too."

"After students go through the training, they defend PBL, no matter what the teachers throw at them," says Barrows, who travels the country promoting and perfecting PBL in the national network of schools participating in Ventures for Education.

These include about 85 high schools with large disadvantaged populations in Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn, New York; Alabama; Arkansas; and the Navajo nation in Arizona. The Chicago area's math and science academy uses PBL along with a traditional curriculum in social science and science.

"PBL is something that will transform education," predicts Barrows. "I really believe that this is what we need to reconnect our schools to life. Certainly, it's going to give students the skills they need in any work they're going to perform."