The purposes of education for the students with disabilities are developing their potentialities and preparing themselves to become independent. Social studies are the most practical and realistic subject in preparing the disabled student ability to independence. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of PBL(Problem Based Learning) on academic achievement and problem solving abilities for the students with disabilities. The participants of this study were 20 students with disabilities from 4 classrooms of a special school in Sungnam. To develop the social studies lesson plan using PBL, contents from Korean National Curriculum of Social Studies were extracted and nonstructural and practical problems were created based on the curriculum. The participants of both the experimental and control group were administered the achievements tests for social studies and the problem solving abilities before and after the experiment. ANCOVA was used to test the differences between experimental and control group with the pretest scores as covariate. The results of this study show that PBL is effective to improve the academic achievements and the problem solving abilities of the students with intellectual disabilities. Collateral effects, such as, students' presentation skills, writing abilities, and internet utilization abilities, were found to be improved by the qualitative results.
Key Words : Problem-Based Learning(PBL), Social Studies, Problem Solving Ability