In this paper, I present a case study of the introduction of Problem-Based Learning / Project-Based Learning (PBL) as an Active Learning method for seminar activities and discuss the results obtained from the analysis. In collaboration with the shopping district and local government, third-year students were involved in activities addressing the community’s challenge of promoting the shopping district for five months.
The educational goal of those activities was to provide the 16 students with an opportunity to cooperate with one another and apply the professional knowledge acquired so far to unsupervised practical problem-solving tasks. The educational results were presented through an exploratory research methodology using the author’s observations and quantitative text analyses of reports submitted by the students. Findings suggested that collaboration with other subjects enhanced educational effectiveness and was crucial for Active Learning. In addition to the “first step of thinking and putting the issue into words,” the study also indicated the importance of another process of “thinking and putting into words” that includes “the first stage of thinking in the direction of problem solving and putting it into words” and “the second stage of reflecting on the content of the activities, thinking, putting the answer into words, and evaluating the solution,” which also needs third-party evaluation.
View full abstract