Abstract:The modern education community agrees that deep and effective learning is best promoted by situating learning in authentic activity. Many in the education community have put in place constructivist classroom practices that put students into situations where they must make hypotheses, collect data, and determine which data to use in the process of solving a problem or participating in some kind of realistic analysis or investigation. Research in case-based reasoning (CBR), which provides a plausible model of learning from problem solving situations, makes suggestions about education that are consistent with these educational theories and methodologies and which can provide added concreteness and detail. In this paper, we show how CBR's suggestions can enhance problem-based learning (PBL), which is already a well-worked-out and successful approach to education. The computational accounts CBR provides of reasoning activities, especially of knowledge access, access to old experiences (cases), and use of old experiences in reasoning, suggest guidelines about materials that should be made available as resources, the kinds of reflection that will promote transfer, qualities of good problems, qualities of the environment in which problems are solved (e.g., affordances for feedback), and sequencing a curriculum. The two approaches complement each other well, and together, we believe they provide a powerful foundation for educational practice in the constructivist tradition, one that at once combines lessons learned from classroom practice with sound cognitive theory.

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This article presents a translational model of curricular design in which findings from investigating learning in university BME research laboratories (in vivo sites) are translated into design principles for educational laboratories (in vitro sites). Using these principles, an undergraduate systems physiology lab class was redesigned and then evaluated in a comparative study. Learning outcomes in a control section that utilized a technique-driven approach were compared to those found in an experimental class that embraced a problem-driven approach. Students in the experimental section demonstrated increased learning gains even when they were tasked with solving complex, ill structured problems on the bench top. The findings suggest the need for the development of new, more authentic models of learning that better approximate practices from industry and academia.

is a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech. Fasse studies the efficacy and value of student-centered learning initiatives, specifically problem-based and project-based learning, in classrooms, instructional labs, and undergraduate research experiences. She joined the BME faculty in 2007, following 10 years in Georgia Tech's College of Computing where she was a member of the NSF-funded Learning By Design problem-based learning curriculum development and research project. She also conducted an NSF-funded ethnographic study of learning in a problem-driven, project-based bio-robotics research lab at Georgia Tech. In addition to her duties in BME, she is a member of the interdisciplinary research team conducting the Science Learning: Integrating Design, Engineering, and Robotics (SLIDER) project.

The China Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) is an NSF-funded research project offering undergraduate students three consecutive semesters of lab research, including an integrated international component. The goal of CURE is to provide undergraduate students with an international research experience that offers them a global perspective on research challenges and opportunities in the field of biomedical engineering while enhancing their skills in scholarship and innovation through research. A related objective is to motivate students not only to enter graduate studies, but also to enroll in a graduate program with an international component. A third goal is for these undergraduate students to serve as a type of shared asset linking the work, communication, and cultures of the three institutional partners. For this first report of the three-year project, the attention is limited to what we learned about facilitating the international module of the program from the first cohort's experiences. In future reports we will widen our lens to include the overall effects of the 12 months of undergraduate research.