Opening the black box: Why we need a PBL TalkBank database

Background: Interest runs high these days in developing "evidence-based" re views to provide guidelines for instructional practice. However we lack car eful documentation of the ways in which the practices of problem-based lear ning (PBL) vary across groups and across implementations. A necessary start ing point for developing any sweeping conclusions about the efficacy of PBL as an instructional innovation, therefore, is that we begin to become more articulate about what it is that people do when they say they are doing PB L. Summary: A proposal is offered for a new initiative in medical education re search, one focused on documenting the range of practices employed in diffe rent implementations of PBL. A vital facet of this initiative would be the development of a shared corpus of video recordings referred to here as the "PBL TalkBank database." Conclusions: We propose that medical educators adopt the tradition employed in linguistics and communication studies of creating shared data corpora. The corpus in this case would consist of recordings, transcripts, and resea rch notes documenting PBL practices in different PBL curricula. Preliminary work has been undertaken to develop such a database, and we invite the par ticipation of other researchers. Copyright (C) 2001 by Lawrence Erlbaum Ass ociates, Inc.