Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate the research trends in dissertations on PBL from 2002 to 2015 in Turkey. For this purpose, the master's and doctorate dissertations in the National Thesis Database of Council of Higher Education (CoHE) were selected for rigorous content analysis. The analysis was utilized to classify the type of study, the learning domains, research methods, research designs, research domains, subject groups, group sizes, length of treatments and data collection instruments. For analysis purposes, frequencies and percentages were calculated for each category. Additionally, the results obtained in these dissertations were examined and reported separately with regards to cognitive, affective and conative domains. According to analysis results; science is the most favorable learning domain, quantitative methodology is more utilized as compared to qualitative and quantitative methods, cognition and affect followed by cognition only are the mostly utilized research domains, subject groups are predominantly at elementary education level and secondly from teacher education, studies preferred to have a group size of 41-80, the treatments on PBL research last mostly four to six weeks, and finally majority of the studies use achievement tests and attitude scales as instruments of measurement.
Highlights
The Turkish education system, which is under the supervision and control of the Ministry of National Education (MoNE), consists of three levels which make up 12 years of compulsory education: The elementary school education, the middle school education
The conventionally taught students performed significantly better than their problem based learning (PBL) counterparts on the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) Step 1, which focuses on concepts of basic science that are important to the practice of medicine, with special emphasis on principles and mechanisms underlying health, disease and methods of therapy
Analysis show that PBL research was most frequently utilized in the learning domain of science (86%), followed by social studies domain (10%), whereas there were only 2 studies in the domain of arts and 3 studies in the domain of language arts (Table 2)
Summary
The Turkish education system, which is under the supervision and control of the Ministry of National Education (MoNE), consists of three levels which make up 12 years of compulsory education: The elementary school education (grades 1-4), the middle school education (grades5-8), and the high school education (grades 9-12). Starting in the 2005-2006 Academic Year, constructivist teaching and learning was introduced into elementary and secondary education and curricula were changed . With the onset of constructivism in Turkish education system, research started to focus on methodologies such as project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, case-based learning, etc., which embody the principles of constructivist teaching and learning [1]. Problem-based learning (PBL) is one of those constructivist teaching and learning methodologies implemented in schools and investigated in current research in Turkey. It is quite obvious that more review studies are needed to analyze PBL's appropriateness, its application and practices, its strengths and weaknesses, and its potential influence on today’s education [14], in Turkey. As more disciplines and educational settings (e.g. elementary education, higher education) began experimenting with PBL, it became necessary to review the outcomes reported in these
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