The transition from high school to university often amounts to a muddled process, making it both an exciting and challenging time for many undergraduate students. Integrating both academically and socially is key in this respect. Social support from peers and teaching staff, but also from family and friends, can have a decisive impact. A learning…

Background: Developing teamwork skills is a central objective of engineering education. Psychological safety and conflict management are pivotal components of teamwork, yet despite their significance, research in engineering project-based learning (PBL) contexts is scant. Understanding students' experiences with psychological safety and its…

Universities are recognizing the need to prepare graduates to think conceptually and have the ability to take on complex, real-world problems. Strategies to assess conceptual knowledge are limited and often require more time and effort to complete than is accessible for most undergraduate courses. Card sorting is a very broad technique for…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of perceived problem quality in the relationship between students' (N = 226) achievement goals and autonomous motivation to study in a problem-based learning (PBL) environment. Specifically, the relationships between students' achievement goals (mastery-approach, performance-approach,…

Student loan debt and delinquency is a mounting problem among college graduates. To show students the consequences of debt-financing their education in an economic context, the author describes a collaborative problem-based learning activity designed for small, introductory economics courses. The activity has three parts: an introduction to the…

Wynn, Mosholder, & Larsen (2014, 2016) studied the effect of problem-based learning (PBL) on the development of postformal thinking (PFT) skills among first-year learning community (LC) students and attributed the significant PFT gains, in part, to the metacognitive reflection component of their PBL method, recommending it as a way to…

Aim/Purpose: The traditional method of teaching e-safety by lecturing is not very effective. Despite learners often being equipped with the right knowledge, they reject the need to act accordingly. There is a need to improve the way digital e-safety is taught. Background: The study compares four different teaching styles, examining how each…

A concept map is a graphical tool to activate and elaborate on prior knowledge, to support problem solving, promote conceptual thinking and understanding, and to organize and memorize knowledge. The aim of this study is to determine if the use of concept mapping (CM) in a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum enhances the PBL process. The paper…

This article presents an instructional model for teaching a gateway history course that affects students by: 1) improving their ability to think at higher levels; 2) increasing engagement; and 3) enhancing their perception of the relevancy of the course material in comparison to traditional lecture and discussion. The model includes problem-based…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how PBL student teams develop specific leadership configurations when implementing interdisciplinary projects and whether or not tutors help in dealing with the group interactions that are subsequently generated. The data set was drawn from 2 cohorts of first-year students engaged in PBL activities in an…