“ . . . the learning which results from the process of working towards the understanding of, or resolution of, a problem”
 
                                        (Barrows and Tamblyn, 1980: 1)
 
 
PBL was also a response to the need to train more medical students at a faster rate, but it was seen as a promising solution to many of the difficulties in professional curricula generally. These included curricula overload due to a steady increase in basic scientific knowledge, over
emphasis on the memorization and recall of facts at the expense of scientific reasoning and a failure to integrate basic scientific concepts into clinical practice (Barrows and Tamblyn, 1980).

The majority of studies undertaken to date in the field of PBL have been in the United States, the Netherlands and Australia, while in the UK little of note has been conducted despite PBL’s growing popularity in a number of fields.

Problem-based learning, as it emerged in the sixties and seventies, appeared to be a method which was sensitive and responsive to the educational philosophy of its time.  Theoretical influences were many.  For example Popper (1959) suggested that learning takes place through the formulation of problems and through trial and error in solving these problems. Rogers (1969) promoted a person-centred approach to learning.  Knowles in the 1970s was
arguing that the needs of adults, as learners, were different from those of children.  He suggested that teacher centred subject-based learning assumes that the learner’s experience is of less value than the teacher’s, whereas student-centred learning focusses on the process of learning to learn  (Knowles, 1975).  The innovative work of Perry in the 1970s was one of
the first explorations of student learning through the world of the learner (Perry, 1970).

The incremental body of knowledge about how students learn has created a move within the higher education system itself to create educational environments which are more conducive to learning. For example Perry’s work has been used by many (Belenky et al, 1986; Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983; Hounsell, 1987; Gardiner, 1989) to support, explore and foster learning methods which are more active, and which help students to interact with both the material to
be learned and their world.
 
 
The incremental body of knowledge about how students learn has created a move within the higher education system itself to create educational environments which are more conducive to learning.  For example Perry’s work has been used by many (Hounsell, 1987; Gardiner, 1989) to support learning methods which are more active, and which help students to interact with both the material to be learned and their world.  Curriculum design has also been an area of growing interest.  The pioneering work of Stenhouse (1975) challenged the use of behavioural methods in the design of curricula.  Stenhouse’s fundamental objections to the universal application of objectives are that it both mistakes the nature of knowledge and the nature of improving practice.  He distinguishes between four different educational processes: training, instruction, initiation and induction, and argues that although the objectives model gives a reasonably good fit between training and instruction, this is not so with initiation and induction.  Stenhouse’s main focus is that of induction into knowledge since the most important characteristic of this mode is that one can ‘think with it’: knowledge he argues is a structure to sustain creative thought and provide frameworks for judgement, and is largely concerned with synthesis.
 

Meanwhile new debates about professional education have also been influential in putting PBL high on the agenda within higher education.  Professional education is an area which has grown and developed through a number of changes since the sixties.  Barnett (1992) suggests that the growth of professional education is possibly the most significant feature of
development of higher education in the UK over the last thirty years.

Experimentation around the use of PBL was therefore shaped by new questions being raised about professional education in the context of unprecedented world expansion in higher education in the sixties.  In the seventies as interest grew in how and what students learned rather than how much, the then polytechnics had been created to form a more socially responsive sector of higher education with issues of public accountability to the fore.
During the eighties learning became increasingly a public matter and concern mounted that professional groups allowed their own interests to predominate in the management of their affairs (Haskell, 1984).

Changes appeared to have emerged as a result of the Government’s growing demand for greater accountability within education and employers’ preferences for graduate entrants with problem solving skills.  It was also as a result of influences elsewhere in the world.  The innovative work of Schein (1972) and Argyris and Schön (1974, 1987) provides an example. Schein (1972) proposed four directions of change for professional education:

- more flexible professional schools which promote a variety of paths leading to a variety of careers

- more flexible early career paths

- more transdisciplinary curricula that integrate several disciplines into new professions that would be more responsive to the new social problems

- complete integration of the behavioural and social sciences into professional curricula at the basic science and applied skill level.

The work of Argyris and Schön (1974) at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology also helped to raise a number of important issues relating to the way in which professionals think and act, and suggested that professional learning and practice required ‘a kind of knowing’ which reached beyond that of positivist science.  They argued that situations with which professionals dealt were generally unstructured.  This influential work also highlighted
the contradictions between espoused theories and theories in use.  Such work helped to prompt change in professional education through an exploration of the nature of knowledge and the relationship between theory and practice in professional courses.  For example Eraut (1985) discussed the nature of knowledge in terms of the way in which it was both created and used
within professional education.  He argued that higher education needed to develop a role beyond that of creating and transmitting knowledge by enhancing the knowledge creation capacity of individual and professional communities.  This would therefore require a greater exchange between higher education and professions.  Ellis (1992) explored the nature of different types of professional curricula. He argued that the integration of theory and practice within professional curricula was vital, and this integration should be seen in terms of the worth  of, and consequent assessment of, practice within the curriculum.  Such research and literature have prompted the incorporation of ways of helping students to understand how practitioners think and reflect in action into both curricula and professional practice.  One such way was seen to be the inclusion of PBL within professional curricula.