Complete thesis - Murdoch University

attitudinal risk• a difficulty in transitioning may be experienced by both staff and students. Bridges(1992) suggests academic staff are uncomfortable withholding information as theywatch students struggle with problems, and need training to develop facilitatorskills or they may be unsuccessful in PBL. Students may be uncomfortable withthe extensive collaboration required or with the lack of teacher-direction giventime constraints• for project development, Bridges (1992) suggests that each PBL project requires120 - 160 hours to construct, field-test, and revise. To this figure should be addedtechnical effort when the problem is developed in an online environment• for teaching, Albanese and Mitchell (1993) suggest 22% more time is requiredto teach in PBL mode, despite the reduction in content usually advocated. Intheir study, when academic staff consider the time per week in preparation toteach problems in comparison to presenting lectures, instead of 8.6 hours/weekprimarily preparing lectures, staff spend 20.6 hours/week primarily in groups withstudentsresource intensiveness• PBL is economical for classes of less than 40 students (Albanese and Mitchell,1993). It is considered not to scale well to large student numbers without greatincrease in staffing resourcescontent• guidelines for implementing PBL indicate that success is partly based on a reductionto the content covered: assuming too much content is a pitfall in a PBLenvironment (Albanese and Mitchell, 1993). This also is useful for modelling expertise– research suggests that a superficial coverage of many topics in the domainmay be a poor way to help students develop the competencies that will preparethem for future learning and work.Research supports the perspective that PBL promotes more in-depth understanding of contentthan traditional methods (eg Newble and Clarke (1986)), possibly explained by increasedstudent interest in the content being studied (evidenced by increased student attendance),higher motivation from the sense of ‘class community’ and problem ‘relevance’. Other researchsupports the view that PBL can enhance student problem solving abilities – PBL165