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.
Grayson H. Walker Teaching Resource Center
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
401 Hunter Hall--Mail Code 4354
615 McCallie Ave.
Chattanooga, TN 37403-2598
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Last modified April 16, 2002
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