What are they taking with them? Lasting learning experiences of CBL alumni

CBL has been implemented in numerous educational contexts as it embraces authentic, active learning, offering choice in problem-solving and learning practices and enabling training in multidisciplinary teamwork and decision-making. In doing so, CBL harnesses the desire of many students for a sense of meaning in their education. Prior CBL research has found benefits for CBL students, but the data have often been collected during or right after the course which does not allow for inferences on whether these learning outcomes are lasting.
This research undertakes a first attempt to explore the long-term learning gains of CBL alumni, by surveying all students who ever participate in a CBL course at [Authors’ institution], about their course motivation, advantages, and disadvantages of CBL and key learnings and competence development they derived from the CBL course. Students mentioned the freedom granted in CBL projects that required dealing with uncertainty and self-regulation both as advantages and disadvantages and described key learning outcomes such as collaboration skills, ability to deal with uncertainty, problem-solving skills, project management, communication and networking skills and many more. Participants stated CBL had helped them particularly to develop the personal and professional competence of Social Awareness and least the competence of Dealing with Scientific Information. Outcomes of this research support prior work emphasizing the variety of student learning outcomes of CBL, but also fuel on-going discussion in CBL research and practice on what and how much guidance is needed and how learning outcomes can best be assessed.