Process study of verbal interactions in problem based learning

Abstract

The goal of this study was to increase our understanding of the learning-oriented verbal interactions taking place between students during the entire problem-based learning (PBL) process, and to identify the relationships between what students say with their learning outcomes. The verbal interactions of one PBL group of five students throughout an entire PBL process were recorded in this data-intensive case study consisting of more than 1000 utterances. Our results show that a large proportion of students’ learning-oriented verbal interaction focused on stating or recalling facts with a much lower percentage involving constructive statements, arguments, evaluation, proposals and critical questions. Simple correlation analysis indicated that percentages of questions, verification questions and requests correlated negatively with student achievement while critical questions, arguments and evaluations positively. At the practical level, suggestions that are relevant to educational practice can be derived from our observations. Furthermore, this study gives insight to the different types of group interactions during the entire PBL process, including those during the self-directed study time, to help us better understand the learning processes involved in PBL.