The lecture technique still dominates in biology education, and there are not enough hands-on, interactive, creative, and problem-solving learning activities to encourage students to apply their problem-solving skills. The purpose of this study is to examine how the problem-based learning (PBL) model and students' metacognition skills affect their…

Problem-oriented teaching (POT) activities are important in classroom instruction. The level of student response can be influenced by different teacher behaviours in POT. However, the characteristics of teachers' multimodal behaviours at different levels of response are unclear. This study applied epistemic network analysis to explore the…

The aim of this paper is to present "the three steps method" of the self-formation of collaborative groups in a problem-based learning environment. The self-formation of collaborative groups is based on sharing of accountability among students for solving instructional problems. The steps of the method are planning collaborative problem…

Although elaboration has been investigated frequently, there is little evidence for the beneficial effect of elaboration in problem-based learning. A controlled experiment tested the effect of elaboration during problem-based discussion on recall. Sixty-seven students observed a video-recorded, problem-based discussion. In one experimental…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how tutor behaviours influence learning in problem-based learning (PBL). A previous study had indicated a significant influence of the tutor's social congruent behaviour on the PBL process and this study further investigates this finding by examining two groups of tutors displaying differences in…

The goal of this study was to increase our understanding of the learning-oriented verbal interactions taking place between students during the problem-based learning (PBL) cycle. The verbal interactions of one PBL group of five students throughout an entire PBL cycle were recorded in this data-intensive case study. The verbatim transcript…

An experiment was conducted in the context of a problem-based learning course to investigate the influence of a learning-goal-free problem scenario on the quality and quantity of individual study. In half of the tutorial groups, the problem scenario was constructed in such a way that it provided useful learning issues (goal-specified condition),…

Students collaborating in small groups is a characteristic of problem-based learning (PBL) that is receiving increased consideration in the literature. In this paper findings from studies in this area are synthesized and discussed. A distinction is made between studies focusing on cognitive effects of group learning and studies focusing on…