Case studies provide students with open-ended situations that feel relevant to their daily lives. To educate children for occupations that have yet to be established, we must teach them how to be excellent problem solvers. This will ensure that they are prepared for everything.
One method is to teach material and skills through real-world case studies, a learning paradigm that emphasizes reflection during the problem-solving process. PBL is comparable to project-based learning, except it focuses more on students producing a product.
Businesses, legal and medical institutions, physicians on rounds, and artists analyzing work have all employed case studies for years.
Case studies, like other kinds of problem-based learning, may be used by students of all ages in both single-subject and multidisciplinary projects.
You may begin using case studies with your students by asking them to answer questions like these:
- What can we do at the cafeteria to reduce food waste?
- What can we do to encourage our school to recycle and compost? (Or, to make it more complicated, how can our school lessen its carbon footprint?)
- What can we do to increase school attendance?
- How can we cut down on the number of students who become ill at school during the cold and flu season?
Students identify subjects they need to learn more about by answering questions like these. Students may discover that they need to examine food chains and nutrition when investigating the first topic. Students frequently wonder, understandably, why they should study anything or when they will use what they have learned in the future. Students learn best when the knowledge and skills they’re learning are relevant to them, and case studies are one approach to achieving that sense of relevance.
Case Studies In Teaching
In the end, a case study is just a fun issue with a lot of correct answers. What does a case study work in a classroom look like? Students are usually required to read the case or view a video that describes the case by their teachers.
The case study is then solved by students in small groups or individually. Teachers create goals for pupils to achieve to assist them to manage their time.
The focus of student evaluation of learning during the case study learning process should be on reflection. Learning and Leading With Habits of Mind by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick provides various instances of how this reflection might be done in the classroom:
Journaling: Have students write an entry after each work session detailing what they worked on, what went well, what didn’t, and why. Students will benefit from sentence starters and clear rubrics or rules.
As Costa and Kallick write, having students “choose major learnings, envisage how they may apply these learnings to future circumstances, and commit to an action plan to deliberately improve their behaviors” at the end of a case study assignment is beneficial.
Students can interview each other about their progress and learning while working on a case study. Teachers might conduct individual or small group interviews with students to assess their learning process and development.
Students can talk about what they worked on that day in a think-pair-share or as a whole class, or they can talk about it in a systematic way, such as utilizing Socratic seminars or fishbowl discussions.
Create a second set of small groups with a representative from each of the case study groups so that the groups may share their learning if your class is working on a case study in small groups.
4 Suggestions For Conducting A Case Study
- Choose a problem to research: This should be something that kids can understand and relate to. The problem should also be complicated enough to offer numerous layers of solutions.
- Provide context: Think of this phase as a trailer for a movie or a synopsis for a book. To pique the learners’ interest, provide them with just enough information about the topic to make them want to study more.
- Create a defined rubric: Giving structure to your notion of high-quality group work and products will result in better final results. You might be able to enlist the cooperation of your students in developing these definitions.
- Include scaffolding for presenting solutions: The quantity of scaffolding you include is determined by your students’ skill level and progress. A case study product might be many pieces of evidence of students working together to solve the case study and then presenting their answers in the form of a thorough slide deck or an essay—you can scaffold this by offering specific titles for the essay portions.
Resources For Problem-Based Teaching
There are several high-quality, peer-reviewed open-source, and easily accessible materials available online.
- The University at Buffalo’s National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science has created an online repository of more than 800 examples in areas ranging from biochemistry to economics. There are materials available for pupils in middle and high school.
- Models of Excellence, a collaboration between EL Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, includes examples of excellent problem- and project-based assignments, as well as noteworthy student work, for grades pre-K through 12.
- Purdue University’s Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning is an open-source publication that showcases problem-based learning in K–12 and post-secondary settings.
- A collection of websites and resources connected to problem-based learning may be found on the Tech Edvocate.
Linda Torp and Sara Sage explain in their book Problems as Possibilities that pupils at the primary school level like how they are taken seriously when solving case studies. “Researchers emphasize the need of linking middle school curriculum to topics of student concern and interest,” said middle school teachers. They also note that high school students find the case study technique “helpful in preparing them for their future.”
About the article
Case studies provide students with open-ended situations that feel relevant to their daily lives. To educate children for occupations that have yet to be established, we must teach them how to be excellent problem solvers. In this article, we have discussed the methods for making learning relevant with case studies.
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