Supporting complex problem solving in BME education

A problem-based learning curriculum is designed to help students develop the reasoning strategies used by experts when solving real-world problems. In this paper we discuss our efforts over the last two years to develop support or scaffolding to help students develop reasoning and modeling strategies in the context of solving complex, ill-structured biomedical education (BME) problems. We report on our first unsuccessful attempts to use scaffolding from medical education, our move towards a more engineering approach and the learning outcomes of that move towards a different form of scaffolding.