Case+Studies

Why use cases?
There are many documented reasons to use cases. Some of the reasons or beliefs about using cases are listed below. How many do you agree with?

**Cases...**

 * Create the need to know.
 * Provide a space to think about practice.
 * Raise the level of critical thinking skills (application/synthesis/evaluation, not recall.
 * Enhance the listening/cooperative learning skills.
 * Prompt deeper diagnosis and meaning making.
 * Develop problem solving skills.
 * Help learners connect theory and practice.
 * Facilitate the social learning process of learning judgment.
 * Are "inefficient transmitters of facts."
 * Provide a vehicle for examining multiple points of view/hearing various voices.
 * Build partnership/collegiality among learners and teacher.
 * Encourage attention to and self-consciousness about assumptions and conceptions.
 * Allow students' naive questions to precipitate profound change in approach.
 * Help students learn to monitor their own thinking.
 * Reflect the contextual, situated, complex nature or knowledge.
 * Help students see connection to their own goals.
 * Help teachers become aware of their own tensions and ironies.
 * Teach students not to take things literally.
 * Teach students that there may not be one "right" answer, after all.
 * Illustrate interaction among variables (especially human ones).
 * Teach that it is easy to overlook important details.
 * Get you thinking and brainstorming.
 * Simulate passage of time, so you can integrate real life consequences and developments.
 * Get students to be active, not passive.
 * Can be structured and convergent, or unstructured and divergent.
 * Encompass an enormous range of possibilities.
 * Create a rich ambiguous learning environment.
 * Provide possibilities for all learners to be successful and a variety of roles.

//**Tip: **// **Teaching with Cases**

The following two factors are as important in Case Study Teaching as they are in any other forms of teaching, perhaps even more so, because an instructor has less control with case discussion than other forms of teaching. 

**Clarify objectives ** ** Plan and prepare:** 
 *  What do you want students to learn from the discussion of the case?
 *  What do they know already that applies to the case?
 *  What are the issues (central and peripheral) that may be raised in discussion?
 *  Can the case "carry" the discussion (Is it appropriate to your objectives)?
 *  how the case and discussion will be introduced
 *  preparation expected of students (written, submitted, papers?)
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> the opening question(s)
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> blocs of time for the issues to be discussed
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> concepts to be applied and/or extracted in discussion
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> concluding the discussion
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> evaluating the discussion (students', your own)
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> evaluating the participants (grades for participation?)

<span style="font-size: 80%; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">--from Silverman, Welty, **//An Introduction to Cases,//** Pace University Center for Case Studies (1997)