Assessment and Evaluation in Problem-based Learning

While Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is frequently a culture shock to new students faced with its alien paradigm, one might say the same thing about the shock to educators who try to use this technique in their classes. Besides the fundamental challenge of creating a good problem, educators are faced with the task of deciding how to evaluate the technique’s effectiveness and how to assess whether students have met the overall learning objectives for the course. It is our contention that traditional assessment techniques such as the familiar multiple-choice and true-false examinations do little to truly assess a student’s understanding and far-transfer of the PBL learning experience. Likewise evaluating the success of PBL as compared to more traditional lecture-based classes requires more complex techniques. This paper assumes a basic understanding of PBL. Details of PBL in a medical setting are contained in Barrows[1] and in a computer science environment in Waters and McCracken[2]. PBL’s student-centered focus and emphasis on selfdirected learning create unique challenges for development of an effective assessment technique. In the medical school model, assessment occurs in the context of an individual PBL problem to be solved by the student [8]. While this method is most true to the PBL model, it is manpower intensive and not scaleable to large classes with only one or two instructors. On the other hand, traditional assessments in the form of objective tests scale well to large student populations, but are not true to the PBL model. In the field of assessment then, we seek to answer the question, “Is there a technique between the Barrows model and traditional assessments that can meet the needs of PBL and still be scaleable to large class sizes?” In their paper on mathematics education the National Research Council (NRC) [3] relates a humorous quote that expresses the dilemma of educational assessments: