Tutors’ role of guiding

This category was made up of several subcategories dealing respectively with 1) Guidance from tutors and 2) Improvement of guiding roles (Figure 5). Guidance from tutors consisted of guidance for question formulation and guidance for students. Improvement of guiding roles could be described through the following two subcategories which were consistence of tutors and tasks of tutors.

Guidance from tutors was mainly firstly described to guide the students to combine and modify the questions into appropriate manner connected to patients’ needs in the PBL case.

The role of guiding could be also demonstrated by sharing advices and topics with multiple aspects for the students to promote the synthesis of each group’s PBL question. The tutors were regarded as the potential approver involved into the question formulation in the PBL.

“They gave the topics which they think is important in our studies and show us how we should go about it.” Participant 14

“They are also the ones who approved the questions that we came up with.” Participant 9

The tutors’ roles displayed also in the process of formulating the learning objectives and approving of the group ideas. The learning objectives or goals in the different PBL cases were built by the students themselves with the assistances of tutors. The tutors agreed with the students’ ideas and opinions in the PBL process. Regarding PBL’s ideas and aims, it was expected by the participants that the tutors could supply enough explanation in the preparation of PBL. They hoped that there would be more distinct explanations related to PBL in order to assist them to get more familiar with learning methods of PBL.

“The tutors set the task and approved our ideas and help us solidify our aims.”

Participant 5

“The tutors/teachers of the course were very supporting in my opinion and also they explained the idea and aims of PBL well.” Participant 8

Simultaneously, the importance of the tutors was emphasized to supply the guidance through the whole process of PBL cycle. Moreover, the student perceived that the tutors were supposed to guide and supply supports appropriately rather than affording with over dosage of assistance. The tutors were involved into the students’ discussion during the PBL cycle.

The tutors supervised the students by pointing out the direction for resolving the problems rather than giving the solutions for the group questions directly. It was reflected that the tutor’s guiding role in the PBL cycle was derived to two main lines, which were guidance for students with the learning directions and inspection in group work for keeping the alignment between learning direction and group work.

“The role of tutors is important as they help to guide through the process.” Participant 9

“Guidance role. We have had our teachers involved in our discussions and they give directions on where to go next and how to get to solutions.” Participant 11

The tutors played the major role of providing advices and assistance in the question synthesis as well as the support for knowledge searching, but it was not discovered that tutors played other kind of roles in the PBL. The student expressed tutors’ roles were not displayed as major part of PBL process.

“The tutors helped to form the questions and support to find out relevant knowledge.

On the other hand, I don’t see tutor playing a major role in PBL.” Participant 6

Improvement of guiding roles contained the subcategories named consistence of tutors and tasks of tutors.

The consistence of tutors was mentioned as the part of requirements from students for tutors to improve in the guiding role. The participant suffered the repetition for performing PBL cycle under the same case as a result of the condition that there were different criteria by

different tutors guiding the question formulation. The approval for quality and number of PBL questions were defined variously among the tutors in the opening session and ending session, which indicated the inconsistent with the evaluation criteria from different tutors.

Meanwhile, the participant proposed an advice for the tutors to be consistent with the same criteria for approving of the PBL’s group questions, so that it would not increase the students’

extra stress and time through reoccurring the phase of brain-storming.

“Once a tutor approved questions from a group and also approved that they could have 2 questions instead of three and in the next class another tutors told them that those questions were not the best and they had only 2 so they had to repeat the entire stage.”

Participant 9

Furthermore, for pursuing the better application of PBL, the students thought that tutor could provide multiple learning manners in the learning process, for instance, increasing the additional lectures as supports and simultaneously performing PBL case and group discussions. Additionally, the tutors were asked to create a closer relationship with the participants by the increase of meeting with tutors.

“Also have the supporting lectures to not only rely on the PBL cases and discussions”.

Participant 2

“Closer relationship, be present in some of the group meeting before group finalize the report.” Participant 12

Figure 5. Tutors’ role of guiding