Instructional strategies employing complex problem-solving examine how learners represent the problem space and argue for decisions. Unlike problems with few solutions (e.g., multiple choices), instructors struggle to evaluate solutions to ill-structured problems quickly and consistently across students. This prevents instructors to provide timely…

Practitioners in the field of pharmacy are often confronted with ill-structured problems. Specifically, pharmacists are tasked with making patient-specific recommendations that are both safe and effective, which requires combining knowledge from the biomedical, behavioral, and pharmaceutical sciences. Given the dynamic nature of pharmacy as a…

This paper makes a reflection on the assessment of historical thinking in compulsory education. First, the article reflects on the type of knowledge that is being evaluated (memory or understanding). According to current thinking, assessment should meet the teaching aims set out by the teacher, it should be another means of monitoring and…

Discussions about the relationships between formative and summative assessment have come full circle after decades of debate. For some time formative assessment with its emphasis on feedback to students was promoted as better practice than traditional summative assessment. Summative assessment practices were broadly criticised as distanced from…

In early 2011, the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) invited three universities--University of North Carolina, Charlotte; Purdue University; and Wayne State University--to participate in the third annual University Human Performance Technology (HPT) Case Study Competition. Each university put together a team of three or four…

How can teachers be helped, at relatively little expense, to improve their professional practice? This problem was addressed in "Improving Formative Assessment in Vocational Education and Adult Literacy, Language and Numeracy Programmes"--the IFA project. Adopting a specific problem-based methodology as part of an action research…

This study aims to explore problem-based learning (PBL) in conjunction with students' confidence in the basic ideas of electromagnetism and their motivational orientations and learning strategies. The 78 first-year geology and geophysics students followed a three-week PBL instruction in electromagnetism. The students' confidence was assessed…

This paper presents our experiences and the challenges identified in transforming traditional lecture-based modules at a university into problem-based blended learning within a social constructivist approach. Our experiment was, among other factors, motivated by an urgent need to meet new curriculum requirements by reducing the lecturing time in a…

Problem solving and teamwork abilities are important skills for graduates entering the environment profession. Through a problem based learning approach small groups of students from the environmental courses at RMIT University have been gaining these professional skills by undertaking projects in Vietnam. With three years experience in running…

Clear verbal communication is a key skill for the modern scientist. In this article we describe two model science courses, one given to a small class and the other to a large class, in which verbal communication is emphasized as a key learning objective. Both courses use a form of problem-based learning (PBL) with an end point that involves…

The Personal Progress Index, designed to assess students' knowledge at regular intervals, is administered at the McMaster University (Ontario) Faculty of Health Sciences three times annually. Feedback is provided to students, and accumulated student performance is determined for summative evaluation. Results over 4 classes (n=400) show it to be…