Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 11, Numbers 2 and 3

The notion of learning through solving or managing problems is not new, and it is possible to trace the origins of problem-based learning (PBL) back to early forms of learning. In the 5th century B.C. Protagoras (and later Artistotle), for example, trained students in the dialectic, in which students tried to reconcile oppositions presented in a thesis or problem, and Socrates used questioning approaches to help students to explore the inadequacies of their proffered solutions (Levine & Nidiffer, 1996). A more recent connection may be found in the work of Dewey (1938), who emphasized the human capacity to reconstruct experience and, thus, make meaning of it. Dewey opposed theories of knowledge that considered knowledge specialized and independent of its role in problem-solving inquiry. Dewey's work contributed to the concept of active and experiential learning as well as to PBL (Fuhrmann, 1996), and it has been argued that PBL fits broadly into the experiential learning tradition (Biggs, 1999; Savin-Baden, 2000).