Building On and Honoring Forty Years of PBL Scholarship from Howard Barrows: A Scientometric, Large-Scale Data, and Visualization-based Analysis

Abstract

Over the past forty years, Howard Barrows' contributions to PBL research have influenced and guided educational research and practice in a diversity of domains. It is necessary to make visible to all PBL scholars what has been accomplished, what is perceived as significant, and what is the scope of applicability for Barrows' groundbreaking findings. As more disciplines recognize Barrows' efforts and adopt PBL in education, it becomes crucial but challenging to sustain community memory so that PBL scholars are kept well informed of research innovations in various domains. In this paper, we review Barrows' scholarly efforts in PBL and reveal the impacts on subsequent studies in various domains. A bibliometrics analysis is conducted on Barrows' PBL publications and the corresponding citations to quantitatively measure Barrows' impact. Our findings demonstrate Barrows' exceptional contributions to PBL and the disciplinary differences in conducting PBL studies based on Barrows' work. It is also revealed that PBL scholars who share similar interests have rarely collaborated with each other. The PBL research community has a real opportunity to connect isolated research groups and reduce the fragmentation so that research innovations in one domain can be disseminated to inform other scholars.

Mapping Knowledge Produced on Problem-Based Learning between 1945 and 2014: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Despite pronounced progress on the application and research regarding PBL, no bibliometric studies in the literature that examine scientific production on the subject on a broad time scale are available, with the exception of one bibliometric analysis by Xian and Madhavan (2013) regarding the contribution of Howard Barrows to PBL research. Barrows was an American physician who for over forty years has been a leading researcher and propagator on the use of PBL in medical education.…”

Mapping continuity and change in the intellectual structure of the knowledge base on problem‐based learning, 1974–2019: A systematic review

“…It was noted at the outset that this review was designed to extend findings reported in prior bibliometric reviews of the PBL literature. These bibliometric reviews employed citation analysis to identify high-impact authors (Xian andMadhavan, 1436 P. Hallinger 2013;Pinho et al, 2015) and documents (Azer, 2017) in the PBL literature. For example, using citation analysis of a much smaller database, Pinho et al (2015) identified Barrows, Schmidt, Norman, Hmelo-Silver, van der Vleuten, Dolmans and Sherpbier as thought leaders in the PBL literature.…”

“…The motivation to adopt PBL in medical education arose from perceived inadequacies of traditional teacher‐centred instruction, which yielded poor results with respect to student retention and transfer of medical knowledge and skills (Schmidt, 1983). While early adoption of PBL was concentrated in medical education during the 1980s, the use of PBL gradually spread to other fields of professional and K‐12 education in subsequent decades (Xian and Madhavan, 2013).…”

“…Vernon and Blake, 1993; Colliver, 2000; Dochy et al ., 2003; Gijbels et al ., 2005; Strobel and Van Barneveld, 2009) to integrate findings on the effectiveness of PBL. More recently, scholars have complemented these content‐oriented reviews of research with ‘bibliometric reviews’ aimed at documenting and analysing trends in PBL knowledge production (Xian and Madhavan, 2013; Pinho et al ., 2015; Azer, 2017). These reviews have documented the growth of this literature and analysed the citation impact of authors (Pinho et al ., 2015), journals (Pinho et al ., 2015) and documents (Azer, 2017).…”

Development of a Problem-Based Learning Matrix for Data Collection

“…Two possible explanations for this variability are the discrepancies in implementation and problem type (Walker & Leary, 2009). Another explanation is the lack of consensus in definitions of PBL (Xian & Madhavan, 2013). While multiple scholars have advocated for considering PBL as a "genus for which there are many species and subspecies" (Barrows, 1986, p. 485), the scholarly community is still lacking a depth of understanding in how PBL is defined and implemented in different disciplines (Xian & Madhavan, 2013).…”