Complete thesis - Murdoch University

to set up meetings, discuss their approach to the problem or tentative findings/solutionpaths and discuss the pros/cons of the approaches they were favouring. When issueswith tools and notations arose, other consultants were ‘engaged’ to resolve these.This change in relationship with the teacher was very noticeable. While some studentswere critical of the lack of guidance provided by the learning environment (and byimplication the teacher) (more of what is expected in triggers), others could see thevalue of not relying on the teacher as heavily (requires self motivation to research whatwe were to produce; proactive learning - good chance of absorbing info better)• Premise – Glass (1995) suggests that discipline and creativity are the odd couple ofsoftware development – the discipline imposed by methodology, for example, forms aframe for the opportunistic creativity of design. The educational dilemma becomes oneof providing an educational base that enables software developers to both create andengineer the systems they build: to be adaptable to the changing environment that isinevitable in their chosen discipline. The PBL approach promised to provide studentswith a solid foundation in subject matter while at the same time exposing them toreal-world characteristics. As a strategy, PBL was also important in that it targetedissues that were raised in the evaluation of the previous master/apprentice strategy.However the requirements of the strategy, strict adherence to the PBL methodologychosen, was finally seen as a restriction on other aspects of the unit goals, namely theadvocacy of creative elements in student approach to the problem. In effect, the strategydoes not align well enough with professional practice in the discipline. There is asuggestion that efforts to help students learn at the levels of analysis, synthesis, andevaluation may be impeded by a mismatch between the kinds of thinking actually requiredin specific disciplines and generic formulas for encouraging higher-order thinking(Middendorf and Pace, 1986). In the final analysis, applying a strict PBL methodologyfor learning may run counter to an important strand in current thinking about teachingthat stresses the disciplinary nature of knowledge. As a tool for learning, it must beadapted to the discipline.An additional issue, from the literature, raises the problem of contextualisation. The researchinto case-based and PBL suggests that presenting overly contextualised knowledge as themechanism to learn leads to failure to transfer flexibly to new situations (Vanderbilt, 1997).Abstract problem representation is seen as one approach to dealing with this issue (Spiroet al, 1991).322