Problem-based learning to develop students’ character in biology classroom

Education challenge these days is to yield smart grad having good character. Character is coherent thing to personality including totality idea, aspiration, attitude found on individual that are expressed in mind and action (Lie, 2007). Character refers to group of attitudes, behaviors, motivations, and skills (Musfiroh, 2008) and can determine someone personality. Someone who has a good character, will have thinking the good, feeling the good, as well as having acting the good. Equally, good character represents a harmony among knowing the good, desiring the good, and doing the good (Lickona, 2004). Bahri et al. (2021) stated that the students have to have thinking skills and character as the characterics 21st century learning. Adnan et al. (2021) found that some skills that needed to success in 21st century could trained through science learning.

One of the efforts to realize the mentioned aspects above is by implementing character education. Character education is a system internalizing good character values to student covering knowledge component, willingness or awareness, and action to apply the values. Character education of its nature is non-simply teaching which are good and which are correct, but beyond that, it ought to inculcate habit to the effect that which is good so that learners can understand, can feel kindliness values and become accustomed in doing it (Ma'ruf, 2012)

Character education at level set of education can be done by developing values through learning to be accustomed, extracurricular activity, tuition of counseling and integrated approach by inculcating good behavior and morality in all subject taught in class (Lie, 2007). To educators, character education is the main duty related to development of attitude besides knowledge and skill. Knowledge and skill are important to be owned by learners, however inducing attitude to form mental state of the learners is not less important, so attitude of the learners will be more directed when owning skill and knowledge for their future.

Character education is conducted in order to form and develop the state of thinking, attitude, and behavior of learners to become a good person having positive attitude, good behavior, noble spirit, and great responsibility that can be implemented in daily life. The target of character education is substantively to guide and to facilitate students so that they can own positive character. Fitri (2012) stated that a model be able to be developed to support efficacy of character education was a step by step process including: (1) socialization, (2) internalization, (3) behaving, and (4) cultivation. From this statement, it can be known that the students’ character was developed step by step, start from how the students were trained through the implementation of learning strategy/model day by day, until the students behaving and make that characters cultivate.

Effort of character development can be done in campus through habituation during teaching and learning processes. Development of value/character during teaching and learning processes is done by using integrated approach in all subject (embeded approach) (Larson, 2009). During each learning activity cognitive domain as well as afective, and psychomotor domain is developed, so that certain specifie activity is not always needed in order to develop character values. The teacher can be a figurative example to the learners, for the development of certain values like honesty, discipline, and responsibility. While to develop some other values like environmental care, social care and creativity, some conditions and situation are needed so that the learners have opportunity to demonstrate behaviors showing those values.

Several studies have been done by the researcher related to the students’ character. Arifin (2017) found that regarding the teaching methodology, teachers had little consensus on how moral values could be integrated into teaching materials and methods, teachers employed different strategies in teaching values, and they faced challenges in implementing character education (e.g., lack of training). Saputra et al. (2013) found that teachers did not use any scoring rubric for assessing their students’ characters, and only assessed the students’ characters based on their subjective evaluation during teaching the students because there was no instrument that they can use to assess the students’ character.

Development of students’ character can be conducted by giving positive experience as much as possible to the students, because, education is an experience, and it is a continuous process which goes on. Experience characters have both active and passive state. Active experience means to try and try, while passive experience mean justly to accept and follow. According to Larson (2009), development of character could be done by integrating character education in daily activity, besides through the approach of teaching strategy.

The character education integration in learning process is carried out from planning phase, application phase, until evaluation phase of the learning process (Khusniati, 2012). In biology learning, students’ character can be developed by applying constructivistic learning strategy (Bahri, 2016). Constructivistic teaching strategy is suitable to be used to develop students’ character because it can give opportunity to them to train various behaviors like honesty, discipline, responsibility, creativeness, and care. Besides, principle of constructivism can facilitate internalization of values. Furthermore, Khusniati (2012) explained that the arrangement of pre-activity, main activity, and closing activity of learning, were selected and implemented in order the students practice the targeted character values. Besides, behaviour of lecturer during the learning process has to represent the implementation of values to the students.

Problem based learning (PBL) strategy is one of the strategies having constructivistic base. PBL is designed on the basis of the idea that learning is not merely process to memorize fact or concept, but interaction process between individual with its environment.) PBL can develop the skill which needed at knowledge era (Duch et al., 2001; Tan, 2003), because it can develop the high order thinking ability such as critical thinking, problem solving, finding and using learning sources, self-regulated learning, developing ability to work cooperatively, and life-long learning (Steck et al., 2012). PBL can be applied in university course because PBL is based on problem, envolves thinking activity to solve the problem, and correlates to cognitive function of the learners (Izzaty, 2006).

PBL is teaching strategy where the learners are confronted with an ill-structured problem of real world. The learners will take an effort to make the the problem to be clear and structured (well-structured). PBL is proven effective to improve cognitive achievement of biology students (Danial, 2009; Sungur et al. 2006). PBL improves learning motivation (Keziah, 2010), has potential to empower metacognitive skills (Ackay 2009; Bahri & Corebima, 2015; Sungur & Tekkaya 2006; Thomas & Chan, 2002), and improves students’ retention (Massa et al., 2013; Prince & Felder, 2006; Strobel & van Barneveld, 2009). PBL provides opportunities to connect theory to practice (Schwartz et al. 2005), also promotes scientific proficiency and literacy, particularly when dealing with scientific concepts, the nature of science and the relationships between science and technology (Duch, 1996). Besides, PBL can stimulate student’s affective process in learning process (Lindeman, 1926; Liu, 2009; Prince & Felder, 2006) and students’ attitudes towards the learning process (Ferreira & Trudel, 2012; Tandogan & Orhan, 2007). Related to the development of character as one of the afective domains, some research emphasize that afective domain is an integral dimension of PBL (Fineman, 1997).