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THE ART OF GUIDED LEARNING: PBL, PJBL, AND ASSESSMENT
Dissertation

THE ART OF GUIDED LEARNING: PBL, PJBL, AND ASSESSMENT

Portia Amoa-Danquah
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
2026
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Open Access

Abstract

Assessment Facilitation Problem-Based Learning Project-Based Learning Student-Centered Learning Teachers
This study examines how instructors describe the decision-making and facilitation processes they enact while teaching with PBL and PjBL. Although these pedagogies are characterized as student-centered, less is known about how instructors sustain student ownership while guiding learning. Informed by constructivist and situated perspectives, this qualitative narrative study drew on interviews with 10 higher education instructors who had experience using PBL or PjBL in their teaching. The findings indicate that student-centered facilitation was understood not as instructor withdrawal, but as active, situated instructional work. Participants described student-centered facilitation as beginning in course design, where instructors built structures that could hold inquiry, collaboration, and uncertainty, and continuing through moment-to-moment judgments about how to keep learning moving without taking over the work itself. Student-centered facilitation emerged as a process of designing for inquiry, monitoring student thinking as it developed, and adjusting support in ways shaped by group dynamics, and contextual conditions. Overall, the study offers a more fine-grained account into how instructors make these pedagogies workable in practice student-centered learning environments.

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