The Process of Student Learning in One-Day, One-Problem

Abstract

This chapter describes naturalistic research carried out to study the process of the “One day, one problem” PBL approach of Republic Polytechnic, in order to gain insight into what and how students learn in all the phases of the PBL cycle, as well as to identify relationships between the learning activities of students (what they know, say, and do) with their learning outcomes. First, we have identified two distinct phases in the “One day, one problem” PBL process – an initial concept articulation phase, consisting of the problem analysis and initial SDL phase and a later concept repetition phase, consisting mainly of the second SDL period, where concepts are repeated and elaborated upon. The significance of verbalization in the PBL process is also clearly demonstrated from the finding that while individual study is important, it influences students’ learning achievements indirectly, through the verbalization of ideas. Lastly, we have also found that collaborative learning or self-directed study alone is insufficient to describe PBL or predict students’ learning outcomes. Instead, the learning in the “One day, one problem” PBL is cumulative, with every phase of the PBL cycle strongly influencing that of the next phase and finally that of students’ learning achievement. Thus the PBL cycle of initial problem analysis, followed by self-directed learning, and a subsequent reporting phase as described by various authors and used in our “One day, one problem” process is one which is backed by research findings.

This chapter is partly based on work by Yew and Schmidt (2011, 2012).