When we want to develop new, young managers, we put them in a management education program, perhaps through a
college of business. Give them their bachelor's degree in management or business. And send them off to get their MBA. We
lecture to them, provide all the information and knowledge we deem managers need to know. But fairly recently, within the
last 10 years, a new approach to teaching, drawn from experience in medical schools, has been applied in management
education; problem-based learning, focused on learner-centric, self-directed learning.
However, despite all the enthusiasm in management academic circles for problem-based learning (see, for example, the
October, 2004 issue of the Journal of Management Education, solely dedicated to problem-based learning in the management
classroom), the evidence presently available does not support that enthusiasm. There is theoretical support for problembased
learning and much practical advice about implementing problem-based learning, but there is very little empirical
support for problem-based learning. And what support exists is mixed at best.
The theoretical support for problem-based learning is primarily found in John Dewey's Constructivist approach to
pedagogy (Dewey, 1938). The empirical evidence used to support this pedagogical theory is drawn primarily from the medical
education literature, with a fragment drawn from the engineering and management education literatures. Although DeFillipi
and Milter (2009) outlined the migration of problem-based learning from the medical school to the management classroom,