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UNDERSTANDING THE “SURPRISES” IN PBL:
AN EXPLORATION INTO THE LEARNING STYLES OF TEACHERS AND THEIR STUDENTS
Rosenfeld, M.
Department of Psychology
Tilburg University
Tilburg, The Netherlands
and
Rosenfeld, S.
Department of Science Teaching
Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot, Israel
Background and Aims
Veteran observers of project-based learning (PBL) have anecdotally noted the phenomenon of student “surprises,” when teachers are pleasantly surprised that some of their academically-weak students perform well on research projects.
The intent of our pilot study was to better understand the nature of these “surprises.” Our guiding questions were, “What characterizes students who perform poorly in conventional classrooms, yet do well in PBL environments?” and “What characterizes teachers who are surprised at the improvement of these students?”
We decided to investigate this phenomenon as a function of the learning styles of teachers and their students (Pask, 1988). We hypothesized that (a) academically low-achieving students who did well in PBL would prefer applied, discovery, technical, or creative (confluent) processing, and that in contrast, (b) their surprised teachers would have learning styles that stressed a preference for acquisition of serialized, factual knowledge.
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