FACILITATING LEARNING THROUGH AN INTEGRATED CURRICULUM DESIGN DRIVEN BY PROBLEM-  BASED LEARNING: PERCEPTIONS OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE THERAPY STUDENTS

The BSc (Hons) in Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) at University College Cork (UCC) is a four-year  full-time undergraduate program, with approximately twenty-five students in each year (including five mature students per year). The curriculum design is a hybrid Problem-Based Learning (PBL) model.  Catharine helped to design the third-year curriculum, focusing on acquired neurogenic communication and swallowing disorders, and is a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) tutor.    The readings, the practice education lectures, the phonetic lectures, the opinions of  my colleagues and my own research are all pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Only after we  put all these pieces together are we able to solve the jigsaw puzzle (Participant 2xxii).    This project focused on the hybrid Problem-Based Learning (PBL) curriculum design used in the BSc  (Hons) in Speech and Language Therapy, and aims to discover whether students perceive it to be  integrated, and/or facilitative of integrative learning. As a part of this aim, I want to determine what sources students draw from to facilitate their learning (e.g. discussions with colleagues; the internet;  lectures/workshops). Data for this investigation was gathered from students' reflective journals, which were developed as part of their PBL journey through the degree.