Is Your Case Study Giving "Meh"?

We all know the moment. You hand out the case study you spent your Sunday polishing, and the room goes quiet. Not the good, thinking kind of quiet. The "is this for marks?" kind. (Second only to the silence when you announce the consolidation chapter.)

What they did

Lara Molendijk, Ross Taplin and Andrew Brennan wanted evidence, not just advice, about what makes experiential learning activities (ELAs) such as case studies work. The literature already lists plenty of "best practice" features. What it lacked, they argue, was empirical evidence of how much each feature actually improves engagement.

So they compared student engagement across 34 ELAs in a university accounting setting. The activities varied on six characteristics that the literature claims are beneficial. Students completed a questionnaire, analysed with regression and content analysis.

What they found

Engagement was highest when an activity was authentic and contained the right level of detail. To a lesser extent, it was also higher when the activity was personally relevant, incorporated the learning cycle and incorporated critical thinking.

A bonus finding that isn't emphasised in the existing ELA literature: how you facilitate the activity was also linked to engagement.

In the paper's conclusions, the authors appear to suggest that whether a scenario is "current" (very recent) mattered less than whether it is relevant to students, and that some of these characteristics are hard to quantify. We could only read a short excerpt of those conclusions, not the full paper, so treat both points as tentative.

The reality check: this is a correlational study. The activities weren't randomly varied, so it shows which features went together with higher engagement, not that adding them causes it. Engagement was student self-report, and the data come from an Australian university setting.