Chapter 6: Theory and Practice of Case-Based Learning Aids

Overview

A case based learning aid is a support that helps a learner interpret, reflect on, and apply experiences - their own or of someone else - that allow valuable learning to take place.

Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is a model for creating intelligent systems - computer systems that can reason by reference to their previous experiences

CBR as a cognitive model, values the concrete over the abstract (Kolodner, 1993. It suggests that we think in terms of cases - interpretations of experiences that we apply to new situations.

Example: a child who throws a ball into the air expects it to come down because that is what she has always seen before.

CBR makes three types of suggestions with respect to educational practice:

  1. Engineering sequence in the learning environment: experiences need to be debugged and tried out again and again.
  2. The need for supports for reflection: Helping learners to have reason to want to interpret their experiences and providing prompts and other guidance for learners can promote more productive reflection.
  3. Use of case libraries as a resource: collections of cases act as external memory. Writing up cases may lead to learners to reflect appropriately

Case-Based Reasoning as a Model of Cognition that explicitly integrates memory, learning and reasoning.

In CBR a reasoner is engaged in recording experiences, interpreting experiences to derive lessons for the future, anticipating when lesson may be useful,  labelling experiences for applicable future use. Essential for CBR is failure.

Cases are interpretations of experiences.

Cases have; settings, actors, goals, sequence of events, results, and explanations linking them together. The betting the interpretations of each and their explanations the more useful the case will be in the future.

If we know what causes failure in a case, this knowledge can be used in future cases.

Explanations that tie pasts of a case together create Lessons Learned. Lessons can identify why things went wrong in a case.

A case library resides in an individual’s memory; they are derived from the individual’s experiences and from experiences of others.

People find cases in their memory if they have indexed them well on creation of the case. Good case-based reasoners interpret experiences as they are having them to identify what they are learning and anticipating when those lessons will be useful.

Good indexes are critical for transfer. The best indexing results from anticipating when the lesson might be used.

Kolodner (1993, 1997), Kolodner et al. (1998, 2003a, 2003b), Schank (1999)

CBR’s Implications for Supporting Learning

CBR aligns with constructivist and constructionist approaches: learners construct mental models from concrete experiences, active construction promotes knowledge development (Papert, 1991)

CBR suggest 5 facilitators for for learning effectively from experiences:

  1. having experiences that afford learning what needs to be learned,
  2. interpreting experiences to recognise what can be learned from them,
  3. anticipating usefulness to develop indexes to allow their application in the future,
  4. experiencing failure and explaining the failures, and trying again,
  5. learning to use cases effectively.

Using CBR to make suggestions for effective creation of learning environments:

  1. learners acquire feedback, and actually try out their ideas,
  2. learners are pushed to predict and explain, and should be helped to do both,
  3. learners should reflect and assess their experiences to effectively index,
  4. learners try out ideas and cycle through interpretation of feedback, explanation and revision of conceptions several times,
  5. learners should reuse their own previous experiences and be given access to case experiences of others.

Using CBR’s Ideas to Engineer Sequencing in the Learning Environment

Goal Based Scenarios (Shank, Fano, Bell, & Jona, 1994)

Learners are places in a situation where they have to achieve an interesting goal that also requires them to meet certain curricular objectives.

Challenges need to be designed that are both engaging and focus learners on the intended content and skills.

Case libraries used in GBS need to index material both in content and context.

Details on the designing of goal-based scenarios (Bareiss & Osgood, 1993; Ferguson, Bareiss, Birnbaum, & Osgood, 1992; Schank, Berman, & Macpherson, 1999).

Critically, GBS design requires anticipating the learner’s  goals and subgoals.

Learning By Design focuses on CBR’s model to suggest how to run a classroom.

Construction and trial of real devices gives students the motivation to want to learn, the opportunity to discover what they need to learn, the opportunity to discover the uses of science, and to test their conceptions and identify gaps in their knowledge.

In classroom activities, students “mess about”, do “whiteboarding”, present “poster sessions”, “pin-up sessions” and do “gallery walks”.

LBD provides:

  1. libraries of cases as resources,
  2. paper and pencil and software tools for learners to keep track of experiences,
  3. activities to connect previous experiences,
  4. software to prompt explanations for decisions made,
  5. software to prompt extraction and articulation of content and skills,
  6. software to help students read cases by experts,
  7. teacher guidelines for facilitating reflective discussions.

Project-Based Inquiry Science (Kolodner et al., 2008, 2010)

CBR-Informed Software to Support Learning

Supports for Reflection and Interpretation of One’s Experiences

The Reflective Learner (Turns, Newstetter, Allen, & Mistree, 1997) provided scaffolding in the form of prompts. It asked students to:

SMILE (Kolodner & Nagel, 1999) provides scaffolding for learners to articulate their experiences. SMILE makes use of a Pin-Up toll and Gallery Walks.

Scaffolding for cross-group collaboration used to support articulation of ideas in peer feedback.

Kinds of scaffolding needed: questions that structure the task into pieces of manageable size, hints about what is expected in the answers to the questions, examples as models of the way to answer each question, and templates for responses.

Case Libraries as Resources provide examples of successful and unsuccessful attempts at problem solving and providing models of case application. Examples: ARCHIE-2, STABLE, ScriptABLE, and Case Application Suite (CAS).

STABLE showed that a case library can facilitate student learning, be successful in supporting design, and be placed in a curricular setting which creates the relevant context - which is critical for successful learning from cases (Shank, 1982)

ScriptABLE - a case library of example projects; hyperlinked web based resources. Learners showed enhanced conceptual answers when asked to explain how they solved a particular problem.

When design case libraries:

  1. provide explicit connections between project-related concerns and conceptual information allows learners to identify why something should be learned,
  2. the consistency and organisation of the the written case is important to build credibility and increase comfort for users.
  3. there needs to be a reasonably large collection of cases.

References:

Bareiss, R., & Osgood, R. (1993). Applying AI models to the design of exploratory hypermedia systems. Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Hypertext. ACM.

Ferguson, W., Bareiss, R., Birnbaum, L., & Osgood, R. (1992). ASK systems: An approach to the realization of story-based teachers. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(1), 95-134.

Kolodner, J. (1995). Case-based reasoning. 1993. Morgan Kaofmann, San Mateo, CA.

Kolodner, J. L. (1997). Educational implications of analogy: A view from case-based reasoning. American Psychologist, 52(1), 57.

Kolodner, J. L., & Nagel, K. (1999). The design discussion area: A collaborative learning tool in support of learning from problem-solving and design activities. Proceedings of the 1999 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning. International Society of the Learning Sciences.

Kolodner, J. L., Camp, P. J., Crismond, D., Fasse, B., Gray, J., Holbrook, J., et al. (2003a). Problem-based learning meets case-based reasoning in the middle-school science classroom: Putting learning by design (tm) into practice. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 12(4), 495-547.

Kolodner, J. L., Crismond, D., Gray, J., Holbrook, J., & Puntambekar, S. (1998). Learning by design from theory to practice. Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences 1998 (ICLS-98)

Kolodner, J. L., Gray, J., & Fasse, B. B. (2003b). Promoting transfer through case-based reasoning: Rituals and practices in learning by design classrooms. Cognitive Science Quarterly, 3(2), 119-170.

Kolodner, J.L., Krajcik, J., Edelson, D., Reiser, B., & Starr, M. (2010). Project Based Inquiry Science. Armonck, NY: It’s About Time

Kolodner, J. L., Starr, M. L., Edelson, D., Hug, B., Kanter, D., Krajcik, J., et al. (2008). Implementing what we know about learning in a middle-school curriculum for widespread dissemination: The Project-Based Inquiry Science (PBIS) story. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on International on the Learning Sciences-Volume 3. International Society of the Learning Sciences, pp.274-281.

Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating constructionism. In I. Harel & S. Papert. Constructionism (pp. 1-11). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Schank, R. C. (1982). Dynamic Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schank, R. C., Berman, T. R., & Macpherson, K. A. (1999). Learning by Doing. In C. Reigeluth. Instructional design theories and models (pp. 161-181). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Schank, R. C., Fano, A., Bell, B., & Jona, M. (1994). The design of goal-based scenarios. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(4), 305-345.

Turns, J. (1997). Learning essays and the reflective learner: supporting assessment in engineering design education. Frontiers in Education Conference, 1997. 27th Annual Conference. Teaching and Learning in an Era of Change. Proceedings.. IEEE.