STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVE: DOES PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING INCREASE OWNERSHIP OF ONE’S EDUCATION?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Students in the 4th year laboratory course in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (CHBE) at UBC perform multi-week problem-based laboratories (PBL). Open-ended industrially-relevant problem statements are provided as context, but teams are not bound by them and can choose alternative problems according to their interests. Operating instructions for equipment are provided, but students must develop their own experimental designs and data collection and analysis protocols. TA involvement is greatly reduced compared to previous courses to promote independence and self-reliance. In previous work, students indicated that this approach helped them develop their critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and increased their confidence in their engineering abilities. Anecdotal evidence and an analysis of the survey data in that study suggest that one possible reason for the benefits outlined above stem from students’ imposed self-reliance and ownership of their work, coupled with a freedom to experiment with no consequences for failure. To explore this question, a questionnaire was sent to the current cohort of students, asking them to qualify their enjoyment of the course (level of enjoyment, workload, perceived relevance), the effectiveness of the course (perceived knowledge and skill development), as well as their perceived level of agency in the course (perceived freedom and autonomy regarding content and research direction). Students were then invited to a focus group to further elaborate on the course and reflect on their overall experience during the undergraduate studies, whether they felt they had agency or ownership during their studies, and whether they believe problem-based learning should be implemented in other courses earlier on in the program. Responses were thematically analyzed, and are presented in this paper.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it