Challenge-Based Learning: Engaging Students with Real-World Problems

Challenge-based learning (CBL) represents a dynamic approach to education that centers on actively involving students in genuine and relevant situations connected to their surroundings. It's a framework for learning while solving real-world challenges, where students leverage experience, harness internal and external resources, develop a plan, and push forward to find the best solution. Along the way, there is experimentation, failure, success, and ultimately consequences for actions.

Origins and Evolution of Challenge-Based Learning

The concept of using challenges to frame learning experiences stemmed from an exploration of reality television, conversations with individuals whose lives center on challenges, and reflection on personal learning experiences inside and outside the classroom. The initial framework was documented in a white paper written in 2008 and published by Apple, Inc. In 2009, the New Media Consortium published an in-depth study of challenge-based learning in classroom practice. An additional study was conducted in 2011 to test if the framework applied to a larger K-20 audience and to look deeper into the acquisition of 21st-century skills. This study included 19 schools, 90 teachers, and 1500 students from three countries. The research demonstrated that CBL is an effective way to engage students, meet curriculum standards, and gain 21st-century skills.

Core Principles of Challenge-Based Learning

Challenge-based learning is an educational technique that actively involves students in a setting that is genuine, relevant, and linked to their surroundings. This style of learning is entirely student-driven, with very little instructor intervention. Teachers do not prescribe the learning activities or specify the specific learning goals of students from the beginning.

The Challenge-Based Learning Framework

The Challenge-based learning framework consists of three main phases. Each phase of these three prepares the students for the next one. This is the stage of research. Students are required to undertake research in order to provide the groundwork for practical and long-term solutions to the problem they worked on previously. The team then creates a prototype and tests it. Using this template with your student can allow you to perform CBL in the classroom with no problems at all. Thinking of having a custom-made template? As simple challenge-based learning examples, the whole classroom collaborates to solve the problem of global warming. In this design cycle often new guiding questions arise, so maybe further work is needed.

The Importance of Investigation in Challenge-Based Learning

A primary goal of educational institutions should be providing students with a framework for forming thoughtful, researched, and well-reasoned opinions and making informed decisions. The Investigation phase of Challenge Based Learning provides the opportunity to develop these skills. In the CBL Guide, we use the dictionary definition of Investigate as “To carry out a systematic or formal inquiry to discover and examine the facts . . . so as to establish the truth” and acknowledge that we are setting an unrealistic expectation. Truth is a tricky idea, and our use of the term is more process-focused than product-focused. In CBL, seeking truth implies looking at the challenge deeply and from multiple perspectives rather than a narrow perspective of preexisting beliefs and ideas. What separates learning from indoctrination is that we explore our world from all angles and, through this investigation, develop informed decisions.

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Guiding Questions

A key element of CBL is identifying Guiding Questions - not just the ones given to us by an authoritative source but every question we can pull from the most diverse audience we can find. By asking lots of questions, we expand our perspectives, learn how to ask good questions and how the questions we ask impact the direction of our investigation and thinking. For instance, why and what-if questions result in a very different investigation than how and when questions. Why and what-if questions help us to look deeper, consider other perspectives and confront our biases. Staying in the question means being okay with the ambiguous. In CBL, we want the learners to be open to all possibilities and comfortable with ambiguity, as this is where deep understanding, divergent and lateral thinking, empathy, and innovation evolve. Slowing down and asking many questions also allows for full and diverse participation. Without slowing down and creating a safe place for asking lots of questions, we often lose introverts, out-of-the-box thinkers, the shy, the fringe, and the less confident. Often, the most confident, aggressive, focused and loudest individuals drive the conversation and make the decisions.

Categorizing and Prioritizing Questions

Once we have sufficiently broad and diverse guiding questions, we categorize and prioritize them. Categorizing and prioritizing our questions forces us to think deeper about the type of questions developed and to identify gaps. Through this process, we discuss why certain ones are more important than others. We must consider why we are asking questions and how our questions relate to others’ questions. We also begin to discuss vocabulary and ensure we understand the words we are using and how others are using words. Having done this work for the last fifteen years, it is startling how there is a lack of clarity over key terms, even in the tightest organizations. This lack of clarity over vocabulary is especially true in education, where a considerable amount of jargon changes regularly. Just because we all say “personalized learning,” “authentic assessment,” or “artificial intelligence” does not mean we have the same understanding.

Identifying Guiding Resources and Activities

With our consolidated, categorized and prioritized questions, we now identify guiding resources and activities to answer them. Once again, instead of taking the word of one source (text, channel, person), we seek to dig deeper and discover various answers to our questions. In this step, we seek not to build a case or prove a point but to explore the questions from various perspectives. At this stage, we are explorers looking at every possibility and recording what we find. We aim to have new perspectives opened, and our preconceived notions rocked.

Developing a Synthesis

With the information from answering our guiding questions, we now have the ability to develop a synthesis. In developing our synthesis, we look for both common themes and interesting outliers. This process may result in new sets of guiding questions that need to be answered to gain the deepest level of understanding possible. The goal is to make sure that we take a 360, macro, micro and 3D view so we notice everything. This is a tall order, and the magnitude of the topic will dictate how much time and effort is put into the process. The key is that we have a process and do not allow ourselves to have unexamined opinions. At the end of the synthesis, we may find something entirely new, we may change our minds, or we may confirm what we believed all along. But no matter what, we have had to examine our thoughts and explore different perspectives.

Act Stage

In the Act stage, we develop solutions for the challenge based on our Investigation synthesis and implement them with an authentic audience and context. We test it to see what works and what does not. To improve the current state of discourse, we need to nurture a generation of learners willing to ask meaningful questions, critically investigate, include multiple perspectives, develop thoughtful solutions, and collaboratively develop solutions.

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Benefits of Challenge-Based Learning

So, why challenge-based learning? Challenge-based learning has been shown to be helpful in developing students’ intellectual capacities. Experimentation, failure, and success are all part of the process, as are the repercussions of one's actions. The Implementation research projects found every teacher observed that students had mastered the content well beyond expectations. (7) Students can learn both content and thinking strategies.

Challenge-Based Learning vs. Other Learning Approaches

Challenge-based learning was created with the objective of replacing pens with iPads, worksheets with real-world issues, and grades with social development. This makes challenge-based learning a natural extension of problem-based learning. There are no major differences between the two styles since both of them rely on real-life problems and solutions.

Project-Based Learning (PBL)

Project-Based Learning has gone from an academic study that yields end-of-unit projects to highly complex methods of creating and publishing student thinking. Broadly speaking, Project-Based Learning is simply a method of structuring curriculum around projects. These projects highlight the process of learning itself by offering authentic, inquiry-based activities for learners to access content, share ideas, and revisit their own thinking. One type of Project-Based Learning is Challenge-Based Learning-the learning driven by the identification and mitigation of authentic challenges and problems native to students and their communities.

Place-Based Education

Place-based education is an approach to learning that embeds students in their ‘place’-that is, the geographical and sociocultural spaces.

Activity-Based Learning

Activity-Based Learning takes a kind of constructivist approach, the idea being students constructing their own meaning through hands-on activities, often with manipulatives and opportunities to experiment.

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Problem-Based Learning (PBL)

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional method in which students learn through facilitated problem-solving. Case-based learning, or (CBL), is very similar to Problem-based learning or (PBL) but focuses on specific patient cases to identify learning objectives. It is also taught using small groups with a tutor to guide group discussions. Initially, a significant difference was the origin of the project and the role of the teacher. Challenge Based Learning, on the other hand, starts with the teacher and student as partners who plan and implement the journey together. With the new Gold Standard PBL, this gap has narrowed.

Challenge-Based Learning and STEM Identity Development

Engineering education more and more adopts Challenge Based Learning (CBL). In CBL, students learn in groups by taking on open and challenging projects that draw on a broader STEM knowledge base. The challenges reflect and mimic STEM professional core practices (e.g., higher education) or authentic but pedagogically simplified versions (e.g., secondary education). Challenges also connect to societally relevant themes and issues. CBL thus seems well suited to helping students build a positive STEM identity (seeing oneself and being recognized by others as a STEM person c.q., STEM professional).

Key Characteristics of Challenge-Based Learning

CBL characteristics:

Challenges are:
- Open-ended challenges: (various projects) do have more solution routes and outcomes
- Ill-defined: students define their projects further within the predefined scope after contacting the stakeholders
- Realistic: taken or derived from professional practice and/or societies' “big challenges”
- Engaging: The challenges are engaging for the students
- Require multi-perspective solutions: e.g., a multidisciplinary team
Learning is:
- Collaborative: Students work in small groups and learn collaboratively: requiring a (multidisciplinary) team approach
- Expansive: Projects are expansive and experiential: Students need to acquire additional new knowledge to complete the challenge successfully and will have to learn by doing
- Productive: leading to a product (e.g., report and design) or “solution” with relevance outside the educational context
Students:
- Have a (reasonable) and growing autonomy
- Work on projects that require self-directed and self-regulated learning
- Work on projects where the demand for self-steering and self-regulation gradually increases over the projects and their growth is fostered
- Are encouraged and supported in applying reflection and reflective learning
Activities are:
- Embedded and meaningful
- Conducted by students themselves in contact with, e.g., stakeholders, beneficiaries, and/or a community

These characteristics apply to all CBL versions, but the exact mix and accents may differ from case to case and from situation to situation. For example, differences exist in terms of emphasizing the importance of “multiple stakeholder perspectives,” the use of ill-defined problems, the need to focus on sociotechnical issues, or the active communication of students with stakeholders.

A More Fundamental Definition of CBL

From a theoretical point of view, defining CBL by listing characteristics is not very satisfying. On the one hand, enumerative may give the impression that the differences and similarities of CBL and, for example, PBL and DBL are merely a matter of more or less emphasis on one or more aspects. It may be tempting to interpret an overlap of concrete characteristics as an indication of fundamental similarity, but this seems incorrect. For example, when comparing whales to fish, there are several observable similarities, but underneath are fundamental differences. In fact, by listing concrete features, a definition cannot reveal similarities or differences at a more fundamental level. Hence, we need a more fundamental way of defining CBL based on an underlying purpose, mechanism, or principle. From such a guiding principle, the various characteristics of CBL would emerge logically: not as stand-alone features but as interconnected building blocks that collectively realize the underlying principle in practice.

Implementing Challenge-Based Learning

The ultimate CBL user guide is the most critical tool that schools should give. Basically, it should be available for whoever wants to create learning communities centered on recognizing Challenges and implementing meaningful and sustainable solutions. Do you want a CBL Challenge Based Learning to plan for your educational institutions? Manaarah is your place to go! We develop and design courses, curriculum education, textbooks, educational games, and other educational materials for your schools.

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