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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 11, Issue 1, Article 16 (Jun., 2010) |
This study investigated university students’ confidence in the basic ideas of electromagnetism, their motivation orientations and learning strategies in problem-based instruction. In general, the students preferred to be confident in their answers to the electromagnetism questions. However, many students were confident in an incorrect answer. The questions included in the electromagnetism test have a diagnostic nature. That is, the distractors are students’ common incorrect answers in the basic ideas of electromagnetism. The fact that many students were confident in these distractors means that it would be very unlikely that these students would feel a need to re-examine their understanding of the basic ideas of electromagnetism. Therefore, they would continue to have their incorrect ideas about electromagnetism as if they were the correct ones. These students would find it very difficult to accept the scientific ideas of electromagnetism when they are faced with the evidence that does not support their incorrect knowledge/beliefs. On the other hand, it would be very easy for the students who accepted the scientific ideas of electromagnetism after they were faced with counter-evidence to turn back to their incorrect ideas when they reason about them (Reif & Allen, 1992). Perhaps, these students need instructional strategies that provide them with convincing evidence that supports the construction of the scientific ideas of electromagnetism more firmly than the PBL approach. This study found that the PBL approach was not very effective in teaching the basic ideas of electromagnetism, although many students thought otherwise. I believe the approach would be more effective if the tutors in the PBL tutorials had a strong physics background since this might facilitate students’ identification of learning issues. Including some formative assessments during the process could help the students to better judge the status of their understanding, which, in turn, would result in better student calibration in electromagnetism (i.e., students would be more confident in their correct answers and less confident in their incorrect answers). The PBL approach puts a great deal of emphasis on students’ motivational orientations and learning strategies for students to be successful in the course they are attending. However, the students in the sample had inadequate use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. One would rightly predict that these inadequacies had negative effects on the PBL students’ understanding of the basic ideas of electromagnetism. For many of these students, it was the first time that they were asked to be self-directed learners in a course. I believe helping the first-year PBL students to obtain these strategies early in the academic year would have improved their understanding of physics concepts. During the PBL tutorial discussed in this article, the students were expected to learn some pre-determined knowledge to be successful in electromagnetism, and their achievement was assessed through multiple-choice and open-ended questions. I believe that, in addition to multiple-choice and open-ended questions, we need to use different types of assessment techniques to assess the PBL students’ performance in electromagnetism. As Barrows & Tamblyn (1980) noted, “problem-based learning requires different types of examination tools that evaluate the student’s ability to work with problems and apply learned information to their understanding or resolution” (p. 14).
The findings of this study support the conclusion arrived by Perrenet, Bouhuijs and Smits (2000) that “PBL has certain limitations, which make it less suitable as an overall strategy for engineering education” (p. 345; emphasis added). Therefore, it would be better to include a mixture of instructional strategies such as traditional “chalk and talk” teaching and project-based learning in the engineering curriculum (Mills & Treagust, 2003). As pointed out by Yang, Chang and Hsu (2008), comprehensive lectures and teacher demonstrations with thorough explanation of the process and the results to students are parts of the constructivist instruction, and I believe they have an important place in engineering education, especially in the science courses in the first year of the programme. This study found that tutors’ backgrounds in science may be a factor influencing students’ success in PBL instruction. Therefore, research on PBL may investigate the effect of the science backgrounds of tutors on student performance in science courses. Future research may also look at the effect of interventions aiming at improving students’ motivational orientations and learning strategies on student success in PBL courses. The findings imply that students’ confidence in their science knowledge is an important part of their understanding, and the future research in students’ understanding of various science topics should pay more attention on this aspect of understanding in science. The theoretical implication of the importance of students’ confidence in their science knowledge for the PBL approach is that its design should be improved to incorporate components focusing on student calibration. For example, formative assessments may prove useful in improving student calibration in PBL interventions.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Assoc. Prof. Mustafa Sözbilir and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.
