“You can forget facts but you can not forget understanding”
~Professor Eric Mazur
As Professor Mazur said : “it is about understanding”. PBL It is about understanding and enhancing skills and it also brings another dimension to the teaching/learning environment, besides challenging the traditional way of teaching/learning , it increase the amount of work for both educator and student, BUT, if we are trying to get our students ready for real world issues ,I still think that it is worth it to use it, as we all know, we need to teach and train our students to use their facts, no just to memorize them.
PBL , as everything new, has some benefits and risks for students, educators and institutions, I still feel that the advantages and applications of PBL (in almost every field) outweigh the risks ( students lacking of prior PBL experiences )will help to create a more interdisciplinary and diverse educational environment that will prepare students for an interdisciplinary and diverse world.
Other advantage of PBL is that it can be use as early as elementary school level (see video below)