why use cases ?

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.
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  Last modified April 16, 2002 
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