Problem Based Learning (pbl) Why Pbl? How It Works and What It Achieves

It is now widely recognised that the transmission model of learning (as practised in universities through the traditional didactic procedure of teaching by lectures) suffers from a number of drawbacks. Memorising knowledge and reproducing it on demand does not develop a student’s reasoning skills or their ability to solve problems in new contexts. In order to do this, students need to be actively engaged in working with new concepts and techniques so that they can make sense of them and relate them to what they already know.