Assessing student learning in PBL often presents a unique challenge for educators
accustomed to traditional assessment methods used in lecture-based instruction. The method
used to assess student learning in the PBL Challenges is based on a three-pronged “adaptiveexpertise” model adapted from the Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard-MIT (VaNTH)
Research Center for Bioengineering Educational Technologies [27] which involves three
measures: content knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and problem-solving ability (seeFigure 6).