Cases can also force students to explore multiple perspectives. In fact, the best cases include contradictory information and paradoxical situations that make students think about what they are reading and sort out and interpret data. Good case studies also require students to apply information from previous courses to the presenting problem or situation. If you have students act out various roles in a case situation, that classroom experience makes the situation and the issues even more vivid. Students also tend to do a lot of careful preparation in order to avoid embarrassing themselves in front of each other.

Tips in Using Cases
One of the most important factors in using cases is the careful selection of a case for the course you are teaching. Sometimes prepared cases can be used, and several textbooks have short cases that you can adopt. Alternatively, you can adapt one of those cases to the way in which you have structured your course and its place in the curriculum. Ideally, we would all write our own cases for our courses, and then we could make sure they were appropriate for the course, its place in the curriculum and our students’ abilities.

In creating a case or adapting one from another source, remember to add additional or seemingly irrelevant information so that the students are forced to sort out what is important and what is irrelevant. It is a way to promote critical thinking while getting them to think about real-world situations.

As part of using cases, many of us have found it useful to hold a short review session on various financial tools, marketing information, group work skills or presentation skills so that the students feel prepared to analyze cases. In addition, consider which model of case reporting—individual papers, individual presentations, group discussion, group written report, group presentation or acting the roles—is the best way to use a case in your particular course. All of them are valid approaches; their usefulness varies with the course and the students’ abilities or interest.

Evaluation
For some faculty members, the daunting prospect of evaluating student analyses of case studies discourages them from even considering using cases as teaching tools. For others, case assignments may seem easy since the faculty members only want to make sure that students have read and can summarize the case. To help those of you who want to push students to analyze cases in more depth, here are some criteria to use in evaluating the case presentation or the paper that you assign:

• Clarity and comprehensiveness of analysis
• Analytic skills
• Use of logic and evidence from the case or from outside reading
• Support from concepts in the course
• Lack of grammatical and spelling errors
• Appropriateness and feasibility of solution (if relevant)
• Professionalism of approach
• Presentation skills (PowerPoint, platform skills, persuasive approach)

In using case studies, I have found that giving students these criteria by which their work will be evaluated has helped them feel they can do the assignments successfully, and it has made the process of assessing their projects and papers much easier.

Summary

Thank you for reading this column about using case studies. Next month, we will discuss types of case studies and ways to use them in various settings and courses. If you have comments about using case studies or suggestions for others, send them to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and I will include them in future “Mayo’s Clinics.”

Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT, is a clinical professor at New York University and a frequent presenter at CAFÉ events nationwide.