Categorisation of the interventions of facilitating tutors on PBL and their relationship with students' response

Abstract

The modular structure of the Primary Education Degree in which the work has been done implies developing an Interdisciplinary Module Task (IMT) shared by the different courses in each semester. In our case, Problem Based Learning (PBL) was chosen as the methodology to develop the IMT. This work studies, on the one hand, the interventions of four teachers while tutoring groups of various sizes; on the other, the ideas stated by the students during the first tutoring session at the first stage of PBL. This was audio and video-recorded. Different categories have been established to classify the interventions of the tutors, and the number of interventions of each type for each of the tutors has been quantified. The categories for the ideas posed by students have also been identified and the participation of the different students on the categories has been analyzed. The results show that the categories established are suitable for differentiating the interventions of the tutors. Besides, when putting together the types of interventions of the tutors and the ideas posed by students, it can be seen that interventions of dynamization can generate a diversity of ideas from students, and that interventions of a learning type foster the sharing of ideas. Guidelines are proposed to intervene as a facilitating and not leading tutor on a PBL based IMT, so as to foster students’ autonomous learning in an effective way.