Case teaching

Cases are real

Cases compel students to work on real world problems that are complicated and messy. Those complications force students to hone their skills in finding and using evidence, choosing which concepts, theories and methods are relevant, and ignoring extraneous and irrelevant material, no matter how interesting it may seem.

Cases are big

Written cases are longer than most other kinds of active learning exercises and take more time for students to prepare and for classes to discuss. Cases often have many parts and reflect many points of view, require analyses that involve several steps and involve a variety of kinds of intellectual tasks. The decisions to be made in case analysis push students closer to the top of Bloom’s pyramid, since they involve synthetic and evaluative activities.

Case discussion is public

Case discussions, in the whole class or in small groups, help students learn effective listening and response skills, push them to present clear and reasoned arguments and enhance public speaking skills. They provide an opportunity for students to learn from each other, which gives them the opportunity to take ownership of their learning. From the faculty perspective, case discussion provides a great opportunity for on-the-spot assessment of student learning, since the discussion reveals information about individual student’s mastery as well as a sense of the gaps in the whole group’s learning.

 

The advantages of incorporating the case method in a fully lecture-based course are best understood as part of the bigger case for active learning techniques in general. A detailed discussion of the benefits of active learning approaches can be found on the active learning site, but it is useful to highlight some main components of the argument:
  • Active learning methods appeal to students in the affective domain, motivating them to engage with the material even when it is quite challenging
  • Students learn the material more deeply, and work with it at a higher level, when they are active generators rather than passive recipients of knowledge
  • Students retain more of the material they do than material they simply read, hear or see