Impacts of a Problem-Based Instruction Approach to Economics on High school Students
Intervention description
Teachers in the treatment group attended a five-day workshop in summer 2007 and received curriculum materials for problem-based economics and training in the materials. Workshop leaders—trained by the developer, the Buck Institute for Education of Novato, California—were experienced teachers who had used the problem-based economics curriculum extensively. Four hour-long phone-based coaching seminars and asynchronous email communications provided follow-up support, allowing teachers to share and refine instruction approaches and work with the developer on strategies for pacing and content delivery. Participating teachers agreed to teach core concepts in economics as identified by national economics standards, to provide information on how they covered these concepts, and to be faithful to their (treatment or control) condition.
Problem-based learning uses problem-solving rather than traditional classroom instruction to teach content knowledge and skills. Students learn by doing. The following description of the problem-based approach illustrates how it differs from the typical direct instruction approach of most economics classrooms:
Each [curriculum] unit contains seven interrelated phases: entry, problem framing, knowledge inventory, problem research and resources, problem twist, problem log, problem exit, and problem debriefing. Student groups generally move through the phases in the order indicated, but may return to a previous phase or linger for a while in a phase as they consider a particularly difficult part of the problem. The teacher takes a facilitative role, answering questions, moving groups along, monitoring positive and negative behavior, and watching for opportunities to direct students to specific resources or to provide clarifying explanations….Teachers still “teach,” but the timing and the extent of their instructional interventions differ from those used in traditional approaches. Problem-based learning teachers wait for teachable moments before intervening or providing needed content explanations, such as when students want to understand specific content or recognize that they must learn something (Mergendoller, Maxwell, and Bellisimo in press, p. 1).
Over the past 10 years staff at the Buck Institute for Education have developed and refined the problem-based economics curriculum in response to standards developed by the National Council for Economics Education. Partnering with the Centers for Economic Education, it disseminates the curriculum across the country with concentrations in states that require economics in their high school coursework.