POPBL in Life Sciences in Education Course
Life Sciences in Education course is the first course of ESD introduced in teacher education programme in
Malaysia specifically at the National University of Malaysia. The course is first introduced in 2005 as the
292 Ruhizan M. Yasin and Saemah Rahman / Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 15 (2011) 289–293
recommendation of UNESCO. It is a compulsory course in the final year and can consider as a finishing school
course.
4.1. Curriculum (Input)
The course aims to promote sustainable education through quality life styles. The five main focuses are
environment, community and family, mental health, physical and emotional as well as interaction and interpersonal
communication. This interdisciplinary focus intertwined with other elements of sustainable education mentioned
earlier through the content and activities which students require to perform in their project. The course is divided
into a few lectures to the whole group is given at the very beginning of the semester (figure 1), group supervision
which started after group formation in the 3rd week until the end of the semester before the final presentation. The
course is run by several lecturers as the main resource person in giving the lecture while other facilitators are also
helping with the small groups because the class size is very big (130-350). The lecture is about 2 hour for 7 weeks
and the remaining time is allocated for supervision and self directed learning.
4.2. Assessment and Monitoring (Process)
The assessment is done thru out the course (formative evaluation). Since the nature of the course is to give
students understanding about the concepts and students should be able to sustain it through the experiential learning,
there is no standardize test given. Assessments are in the form of open ended quizzes (written and oral) conducted in
both big and small groups. Another important measure used is a weekly reflective journal which employed metacognitive
approach. In the reflective journal students are sharing their process of learning. In another words they are
also doing self evaluation on their own learning process. Portfolio assessment is used to measure students’ effort,
creativity & innovation, analytical skills, leadership and team work. The communication skill is gauge through oral
presentation and written report and reflective journal. Every lecturer is given a copy of the assessment rubric.