Facilitating student participation in PBL
Strategies for Facilitating the Participation of Asian (and other) Students in
Problem-Based Learning
Short title: Facilitating student participation in PBL
Louisa Remedios, (PhD., MAppl.Sc)
David Clarke, (PhD., MSc)
Lesleyanne Hawthorne (PhD., MArts)
School of Physiotherapy
Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences
The University of Melbourne
All correspondence should be addressed to
Dr. Louisa Remedios,
School of Physiotherapy,
Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences,
University of Melbourne
200 Berkeley Street, Carlton, Victoria 3010 Australia
louisajr@unimelb.edu.au
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
Abstract
Problem-based learning (PBL) is fundamentally dialogic and collaborative in nature and
requires the participation of all group members to the development of group knowledge.
There is evidence that Asian students and some local students limit their verbal participation
during PBL tutorials, effectively functioning as ‘silent participants’. The tutor’s role includes
scaffolding all student participation without compromising individual and group learning. The
following strategies designed to achieve this aim are based on research findings of the social,
cultural and linguistic constraints experienced by Asian students in an Australian tertiary
context.
Key words: PBL, facilitation, Asian students,
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
Introduction
Problem-based learning requires students to learn through collaboration and dialogue, while
developing collaborative and dialogic skills. All group members are required to participate in
discussion and debate, demonstrating their understanding of content knowledge in a public
forum. There is evidence however, that Asian students have particular difficulty in
demonstrating collaborative and dialogic skills in different PBL contexts (1,2,3,4).
There is a long-established literature in Australia and overseas on the preference for Asian
students to limit their participation in tutorial settings (5,6). Lack of English language fluency
is an obvious exacerbating factor, particularly for students from non-Commonwealth Asian
countries. Further, established cultural preferences in educational and learning styles are
thought to contribute to the Asian students’ preference to limit verbal participation in PBL
tutorials (7, 8). In addition, high levels of language and cultural literacy are required for
effective participation in classroom dialogue and collaboration. ‘Cultural literacy’ is defined
as a knowledge and understanding of meaning systems and a way to negotiate these meaning
systems appropriately in different cultural contexts (9). Cheng (7) noted that most Asian
students find the social rules operating in Western classroom discourse “incomprehensible”,
and are often constrained by the fear of embarrassment or ridicule as a consequence of saying
something foolish before teachers and peers. These concerns may be exacerbated in PBL,
where successful participation requires highly sophisticated communication skills; ability to
cope with culturally unfamiliar norms of classroom interaction; and expectation to contribute
in an appropriate manner to the classroom dynamics while ‘reading’ the value system of peers
trained in culturally different educational contexts.
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
A two-year ethnographic study (3) examined the experiences and responses of Asian
students1 to a hybrid2 PBL program in the first year of an Australian physiotherapy course.
Students reported multiple linguistic, behavioural and cultural constraints to their
participation. They typically saw themselves and were seen by the tutors as the quietist groupmember. All wanted to find a way to participate more visibly in PBL tutorials.
Within this context 12 strategies to facilitate student participation are outlined below.
Strategy 1: Structuring opportunities to participate
A major constraint for Asian students was a concern with interrupting other group members
during class discussions. Avoiding displays of disrespect through interrupting another is a
deeply embedded cultural notion, and these students needed to see clear gaps in conversation
or explicit markers of permission to speak before they contributed in PBL tutorials.
Three commonly used but ineffective tutor strategies were: 1) asking Asian students to “just
butt in when you want to say something”; 2) waiting till the end of a discussion and then
asking the student if they have anything to add, at which point there was nothing left to say on
the topic, or alternatively high stakes information was required; and 3) asking direct questions
that students did not have an answer for, effectively exposing them to public ‘loss of face’, a
particularly challenging strategy for students lacking English fluency.
Structured opportunities to participate such as rotation of PBL roles and turn taking at
different stages in the PBL process are effective for allowing all group members to visibly
1
Asian students in this study represented a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds and came from
countries both Commonwealth background (such as Singapore and Malaysia) and non-commonwealth countries
(such as South Korea and Taiwan).
2
In this context, students were involved with lectures, practical classes and problem-based learning tutorials.
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
contribute. For example, when developing hypotheses, students can privately list their
hypotheses before each member takes a turn presenting one hypothesis to the group for
further discussion. The same can also be done when students are required to develop
questions for confirming or rejecting the group hypotheses.
Strategy 2: Valuing listening skills
True collaboration involves listening as much as it does speaking. Our data suggests that
listening may be undervalued in some PBL classrooms. Asian students viewed ‘speaking’ as
prioritised over ‘listening’ and were concerned with the link between verbal contribution and
marks. Their choice to listen to learn was not acknowledged as important and listening was
not explicitly mentioned as a collaborative skill that required development. Some students
became preoccupied with formulating their verbal contribution at the expense of listening,
thus limiting their opportunity to learn from PBL and effectively disengage from others’
contribution.
The value of listening as a professional skill cannot be overemphasised in health education
and tutors should scaffold active listening skills. Verbally dominant students can be
scaffolded to actively listen through the role of ‘group summariser’. This involves listening to
the group for up to 15-20 minutes without interrupting, before summarising key points and
gaps in the group’s reasoning and knowledge base. This role differs from the board scribe,
whose job involves recording all students’ contributions without judgement, asking questions
for clarification and entering group discussion. The summariser’s role values the skill of
judging quality and integrating complex discussion themes. This strategy develops the
summariser’s listening skill as well as effectively removing them from the discussion,
creating opportunity for quieter students to contribute. Feedback to both the group
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
summariser and the board-scribe on the effectiveness of their listening skills will ensure that
listening is foregrounded as important in PBL. Further, assessment forms should include
criterion that emphasise listening, such as ‘demonstrates active listening behaviours’.
Strategy 3: Strategic pairing of students
It was common for Asian students to limit their verbal contribution due to concern over the
quality and accuracy of their information. They were uncomfortable in publicly drawing on
their prior knowledge as they viewed this as common sense or personal information that did
not constitute valid knowledge to share. Tutors therefore had little evidence that students were
developing their hypothetico-deductive reasoning skills or ability to integrate prior with new
knowledge, skills that are important in PBL.
‘Pair and share’, in which students work in pairs to share their ideas is effective in allowing
students to test their ideas in a less public, culturally less threatening context, while building
confidence and collaborative skills. Once students combine their knowledge with their partner
they can contribute their knowledge to the group. This provides Asian students with an
opportunity to get to know other group members and to contribute to the group’s learning.
Strategy 4: Encouraging the ‘expert’
Asian students found entering discussions in which all group members had completed the
same research very difficult, feeling constrained by the belief that local students were better at
presenting the information or that “everyone knew it anyway”.
Encouraging each student to have an area of ‘expertise’ on one or two learning issues (LI)
creates opportunities for everyone to contribute. While all students are still required to cover
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
all LIs, the expert is responsible for doing additional research and for initiating the group’s
discussion on their LI. Asian students valued having a clear contribution to make and
prepared well to present their data. However, care must be taken to prevent the session
lapsing into a series of mini-lectures on each LI and from students limiting their research to
one LI only. Expert summaries by each student can be distributed to the group via the intranet
(or manually) prior to the PBL session, so that informed discussion based on research
completed by all group members can occur.
The diversity of cultures in any PBL group provides the added bonus of students as cultural
experts. The majority of Asian students in this study recognised that they had cultural
expertise to share, including knowledge of values that guided social interactions, and the
health beliefs and health systems operating in their country. Genuinely drawing on students’
cultural expertise can provide an ‘up to date’ lived understanding of how health systems
operate in different contexts and insight into the perspectives of patients’ from similar
backgrounds. Asian students enjoyed this opportunity to expose the local students to different
cultural understandings.
Strategy 5: Mid-semester feedback sessions
In our program, students attended one mid-semester private feedback session with their PBL
tutor. Students appreciated these private sessions that clarified how the tutor saw their
progress and what was expected during tutorials. They were often surprised at how visible
they were to the tutor and at the willingness of the tutor to support their learning in the PBL
context. They also saw these sessions as useful for making clear to the tutor what they found
culturally difficult and what work they were doing privately to help them learn from PBL.
These sessions had the added bonus of building the tutor’s cultural competence. Both tutors
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
and students spoke of the importance of these feedback sessions in improving group
functioning in subsequent PBL sessions.
Strategy 6: Assessing verbal participation with marks
The formal assessment of student participation in PBL is controversial, some authors arguing
that it can promote competitive behaviour and that the role of tutor as evaluator is inconsistent
with that of the tutor as facilitator (10). However, it is common practice for students to be
assessed and marked on their ‘participation’, typically viewed as solely verbal contribution
(see Strategy 2). In our institution, participation is assessed and weighted from 5 % - 10% of
the students’ total marks. As highlighted in the literature (11), evaluation determines the way
in which students’ study despite anything the teacher may say about the goals of a course.
Asian students recognised that having their verbal participation marked ‘forced’ them to
contribute to the group. It further encourages students to develop skills that they were unlikely
to have worked on without the assessment pressure. We recommend that a small but
significant mark be allocated for verbal participation in PBL and see this as encouraging
important skill development without being an onerous burden. Assessment criteria also make
explicit that staff value and view good communication skills as essential for future
professional practice.
Strategy 7: Providing explicit assessment criteria
Students’ interpretation of assessment criteria and the degree to which each criterion is valued
by tutors is important classroom knowledge. In our institution, criteria that required
demonstration of particular communication and learning behaviours were used to assess
students. It was clear that Asian students had difficulty interpreting and enacting these desired
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
behavioural criteria and it was necessary to assist students to find a way to develop these
skills.
It must be recognised that each criterion is likely to be interpreted differently through
different cultural lenses. For example, a criterion such as “interacts appropriately with other
group members” may be interpreted by Asian students as uninterrupted listening to more
senior group members, a process which is appropriate in their cultural context, but may not
demonstrate the full range of social behaviours expected in western learning contexts.
Further, some criteria may be culturally confronting, such as ‘giving constructive feedback to
other group members’. An effort should be make to scaffold students’ skill development to
meet these obligations.
Tutors also need clarity on the behaviours they read as evidence of satisfying each criterion,
and tutor training and meetings should work to clarify the institution’s operational definition
for these. Further, some tutorial time should then be devoted to ensuring that students
understand how they could satisfactorily enact each criterion. In our program, discussion of
criteria is done during the feedback sessions at the end of each PBL problem, and the midsemester feedback session is used to discuss any criterion students are having difficulty with.
Strategy 8: Rotating the role of the chairperson
The role of the chairperson is not routinely used in all PBL settings, and is, in our opinion,
vital in PBL. The chairperson is responsible for leading the group through the PBL process,
paying attention to time constraints and ensuring contribution from all group members. If this
role is not formally allocated and rotated between students, it is common for the tutor or a
dominant student to repeatedly take it on, effectively making all decisions for the group and
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
encouraging a more ‘passive’ approach from other group members. When a ‘dominating’
student takes on this role they tend to prioritise their own learning agenda, sometimes rushing
through stages of the process at the expense of a more systematic coverage of all aspects of
the process. In this study, when tutors took over the role of chair, tutor input also tended to
dominate the session and students made relatively fewer contributions. Rotating the role of
chair shifts attention away from the tutor; builds group independence and confidence and
builds each individual’s knowledge of the PBL process. Further, all students have the
opportunity to develop leadership skills in a small group context. While some Asian students
were reluctant to act as chair, others relished the opportunity to lead the group and became
active in encouraging quieter students to participate more.
Strategy 9: Sharing autobiographies
All Asian students reported feeling socially isolated and inhibited within their group, a factor
that constrained their tutorial participation. Further they found that making ‘small talk’ with
local students difficult. Since friendship between group members is a key affordance to
collaborative input (12), strategies to build social cohesion within the group are important.
Since diversity is structured into most PBL groups, students frequently know little about each
other and quiet students sometime struggle to build social rapport within the group. Limited
opportunities to build social cohesion within each group can lead to a negative spiral with
some students feeling socially isolated and limiting their contribution.
‘Sharing autobiographies’ involves the first five minutes of each session devoted to the group
‘getting to know’ one group member, who presents a ‘mini-autobiography’ including
information on their background, language/s, hobbies and/or five year plan etc. Other group
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
members then ask questions, looking for similarities and differences between group members.
While building on students’ interviewing skills, and working as an effective icebreaker, this
strategy is productive in building social rapport and cohesion within the group. It also
contributes to the ‘cognitive’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ congruence between the tutor and
students.
Strategy 10: Developing cultural congruence between tutors and students
‘Social congruence’ and ‘cognitive congruence’ between tutors and students have been
identified as important in building student participation in PBL (13). Social congruence is
described as the extent to which the tutor is able to empathise with and relate to the student’s
life experience. The term refers to personal relationships that include understanding and
sensitivity of the tutor to student concerns and social demands. Cognitive congruence relates
to the tutor’s ability to express themselves in the language of students and to explain content
in a way that is understandable to students.
‘Cultural congruence’ can be viewed as a tutor’s understanding of students’ cultural priorities
and sensitivities and an ability to facilitate students in a culturally appropriate and safe way.
Cultural congruence has not been discussed previously in reference to PBL, however its
importance in the tutor-student relationship must be recognised. The tendency for teachers to
assess and reward students in their own cultural image has been recognised (14), and this
tendency is also likely to operate in PBL tutorials. Tutor training should encourage awareness
of personal cultural biases and expectations, and spend time on building tutors’ cultural
competence. Learning more about students’ cultural backgrounds and encouraging the group
to respect diversity will build greater cultural congruence within the group, improving
classroom dynamics and encouraging minority students to participate.
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
Strategy 11: Designing PBL support sessions
PBL was novel for all Asian students who were inexperienced in generating knowledge in
group discussions or in public elaboration of knowledge and reasoning. While local students
were also new to PBL, they were familiar from secondary school with classroom discussion
and debate and made a quicker transition to these expectations. All Asian students reported
major difficulty with the language, behavioural and cultural expectations of tutorials. Out-of
classroom support sessions can assist understanding of the PBL process and how to
participate more effectively in the tutorials. These support sessions should focus on increasing
students ability to read and respond to the expectations of the PBL process and to manage
each stage of the PBL process. These sessions can substantially reduce classroom pressure on
students to ‘perform’ at a standard they feel unprepared to meet.
In our institution, an International student support program (ISSP) sessions focus on practise
for the PBL sessions, revisiting each stage of the process in detail, clarifying what constitutes
valid prior knowledge, hypothesis generation, reasoning and the development of research and
presentation skills. Additionally, culturally embedded information such the criteria for full
participation, how to both ‘read’ and signal verbal and non-verbal information, and
understanding local student and tutor behaviour is covered in detail. Videotapes of PBL
sessions are useful as a basis for discussing and making more visible to students the many
ways of collaborating in PBL tutorials. Further, English language support is invaluable for
some students, although it must be remembered that fluency in English is not a requirement
for intelligent engagement with PBL.
Strategy 12: Allowing students time to develop their cultural literacy
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Facilitating student participation in PBL
Asian students needed to develop their cultural literacy to operate effectively in the new
culture of the PBL context. Cultural literacy can be framed in terms of a capacity to ‘read’
what is important in different situations; in being able to sum up the priorities of the time, and
then act in a way that best suits the situation (9). It also includes the ability to recognise the
legitimate choices in a social context.
The issue of cultural literacy has not been previously addressed in the PBL context, but
without an accurate reading of the expectations, obligations and appropriateness of one’s
behaviour, in all its nuances, students cannot effectively and appropriately participate in
tutorials. Asian students need time to learn the social rules operating in PBL tutorials. It is
recommended that Asian students be given permission to observe how the sessions are run
and what is valued in the early stages of a PBL program. Pressure to verbally participate too
early without an understanding of the rules of contribution can be stressful and unproductive
for learning. Demands for equal verbal participation from day 1 of a PBL program may be
unrealistic for some students and a progressive program of increasing verbal participation
should be negotiated with Asian students.
Concluding Comments
The 12 strategies presented have been used effectively in the transition year of a PBL program
and in our opinion supports the collaborative engagement of both Asian and local students. We
recommend the use of these strategies in the early stages of PBL as a device to build the
confidence and verbal contribution of quiet students. Once students increase their dialogic and
collaborative input some of these strategies will become redundant. For example, ‘pair and
share’ can be withdrawn once students increase their contribution to group learning. Other
strategies, such as rotating the chair and feedback sessions should become well embedded
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routines in PBL tutorials. Finally, we see these easily implemented strategies as genuinely
scaffolding the dialogic and collaborative skill development of all students in the PBL context.
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