Creating the foundation for studying student learning in CBL: A heuristic framework

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) has become increasingly popular in higher education as it responds to calls for learning environments that allow for students to take the lead in their own learning and acquire and apply disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge and skills. Prior research on CBL has mostly focused on identifying commonly agreed characteristics of the educational concept and capture the variety of its implementations. Nevertheless, work on how CBL influences student learning is scarce.
This work presents a first attempt to integrate prior research on student learning into the emerging field of CBL by developing a framework of student learning in CBL. This framework suggests an interplay between students’ personal factors, learning patterns and learning gains at the core, being embedded in several levels of context, each with specific formal, social, and physical content that affect student learning. In a second step, the proposed framework was tested with interview data collected from CBL teachers in order to explore its exhaustiveness and usefulness to describe learning processes in CBL. Results showed that teachers addressed all parts of the framework when reporting their deliberations for CBL implementation and course design. Results also suggested that the framework will be useful to systematically relate the various aspects of the CBL process and context in future research on student learning in CBL as well as education innovation.