CASE STUDIES

Students are more interested in things that could potentially influence their lives.  So why not use a real-life case to teach them certain concepts.  Case studies are ways to get the students to start thinking out of the box.  They are forced to find key issues in the case study, but also think of how these key issues relate or contribute to other issues, and eventually, they need to come up with ways to overcome or mitigate this problem, or to find ways of preventing it from occurring again.

So how do you develop a case study?

The paper that I used to write this blog is written by Waterman and Stanley, titled: “Investigative Case Based Learning”.  It is available online from: http://bioquest.org/case99.html

Step 1:

Define the objective of your case study.  What do you want your students to learn from it?

Step 2:

Think of a scenario that you could use.

Step 3:

Find an appropriate place for your scenario to happen.  This could be anywhere, as long as it is relevant to what you want your students to learn.

Step 4:

Start writing the draft, and when you done, “fine-tune” it until you are happy with the final project.

What you should remember not to do when developing a case study.

1)    Avoid Sci-fi scenarios.  It is always better to use scenarios that the target group knows is possible.

2)    Avoid using schools and research labs as the setting of the case study, because the point of the case study is to get students to think of what is happening in the real world.

3)    Don’t make the students part of the study.  It is always easier to point out someone else’s wrongs than to blame yourself.

The case study I have developed deals with organic and conventional farming and it will be put up on the blog at a later stage.