The traditional lecture based learning approach is under heavy critique (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1970), since it overemphasizes the value of theoretical knowledge acquisition and the teacher’s dominant role in the learning process. Therefore, it has great difficulty in assisting students to recognize the relations between the knowledge and the practice, fostering students’ ability to take action, and develop their cultural awareness. Currently, there are many initiatives worldwide to implement PBL (Problem Based Learning) curriculum in higher education domain in order to build up a student-centered learning approach to facilitate students’ skill development and cultural awareness growth. Among all the factors that influence these curriculum innovation activities, teacher’s conceptions of PBL are quite crucial for the fate of such initiatives since they will somehow define teachers’ behavior (Trigwell and Prosser, 1996; Trigwell, Prosser and Waterhouse, 1999). For example, teachers are more likely to maintain the use of lecture if they think that learning is to obtain knowledge content from external authorities, whereas they are more willing to encourage students to engage in learning activities if they hold that learning is a process in which students construct their own knowledge. The research question is thus formulated as: what are teachers’ conceptions of PBL and their possible impacts upon PBL implementation when a higher education institution is in the process of transforming lecture based learning to PBL?

In order to address this question, we will briefly clarify the concepts of PBL in the first place. By drawing on the works of Barrows and Tamblyn (1980), Boud (1985), Barrow (1986), de Graaff and Kolmos (2003), we will describe an ideal of PBL definition. Generally, PBL refers to a learning approach or curriculum construct method. Within the context of PBL, learning contents are organized around a problem scenario from a real life situation. Students are exposed to the problem situation at the very beginning of their learning process. Throughout the whole learning process, students have the ownership of their learning, and they can make choices regarding their learning objectives, processes, activities, or even assessments. They are encouraged to work on a common problem in the form of groups. Teachers are mainly serving as facilitators to offer a supportive learning environment. The intention of making the ideal of PBL definition is not to claim a unique way of implementing PBL but to allow us to make a comparison between PBL ideal and teacher’s conceptions of PBL in practice.

The main part of this research is a case study (Yin, 1994) on a Chinese university which began to introduce PBL in recent years. After a short description of a story regarding how this university implements PBL in its educational system, we will primarily focus on how the teachers at the university interpret PBL and the possible impacts on the whole curriculum innovation.

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