Learning in introductory organic chemistry

The Problem Based Learning (PBL) is a methodology which has been an institutional learning strategy in Higher Education in numerous knowledge areas for quite a long time. At the same time, PBL may be a powerful tool to introduce active and student centered learning strategies in conventional educative contexts. The aim of this paper is to describe an example of learning activity whose aim is to integrate the ordinary laboratory work into PBL activities framework. The most decisive stages and the difficult issues in its application are discussed. This sort of activities can allow us to improve social and technological contextualization of laboratory activities and contributes to establish more meaningful relationships with subject matter content. Likewise, the carried out PBL activities have contributed to develop competences like planning and organization ability, search for information and its selection, communicative skills, cooperative work, etc. Particularly, an outstanding increase in the tutorial relationships between students and teacher has been observed