ABSTRACT
A main question in instructional psychology has been how to overcome the problem of ‘inert knowledge.’ With the constructivist turn in instructional psychology and the view of learning as an active, constructive and highly situated process, problem-oriented learning has recently had a kind of renaissance (Bransford, Sherwood, Hasselbring, Kinzer, & Williams, 1990; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1991, 1992, 1993; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; Gerstenmaier & Mandl, 1995; Resnick, 1987). The main idea of problem-oriented learning is that knowledge acquired in the context of meaningful and authentic problems can be more easily transferred to real life situations than knowledge acquired in an abstract and systematic way. Of course, the idea of teaching applicable knowledge through problem-oriented learning has a long tradition: For example, at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, the Reformpädagogik (reform pedagogy) implemented instructional models which resemble the constructivist view of learning and teaching (e.g., Gaudig, 1922; Kerschensteiner, 1912; see Mandl, Gruber, & Renkl, 1996). The concepts of discovery learning (Bruner, 1961) and case-based learning (see Williams, 1992) also share basic ideas of problem-oriented learning.
