Students' Perceptions of Their Acquired Knowledge During a Problem Based Learning Case Study

Abstract

Problem based learning (PBL) in occupational therapy education has become very popular, although the efficacy of this teaching method has not been well documented. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a PBL case in meeting faculty generated learning objectives. A pretest/posttest design was utilized to evaluate students' perceptions of content acquisition. A two-way ANOVA with repeated measures was completed; results yielded a significant difference among the pretest and posttest scores (p-v < 0.01). The posttest mean scores were higher, which indicated that students perceived they acquired the intended knowledge and PBL was an effective method to facilitating learning.