Case-Based Reasoning Meets Learning by Doing

Goal-Based Scenarios:
The reason for this comes from the two questions cited above. Where do we put a new case? The answer
is that new cases are stored in relation to the aspect of the old case that failed. Since a new case needs to
be stored in memory in order for it to be learned, we would hope that it would be stored someplace where
it could be found some other time. This can only happen when cases are stored in terms of expectations
that are activated by situations. If a case is stored independent of an expectation linked to a situation,
nothing would cause it to come to mind during active processing.
The second question above was: What form does a new case take? The answer is that it simply copies
most aspects of the old case from which it was derived and adds an exception that is true under certain
circumstances, and it notes those circumstances. Thus, it has the effect of causing detailed discriminations
in expectations to be made that allow a learner to detect nuances of difference in a complex situation.
The lesson for education here, then, is that one can only learn from experience if the experience one is
having is strongly related to an experience one has already had. Since so much of education fails to
understand this key point, and since allowing students to learn from experience is so critical to education,
we shall now explain carefully exactly under what circumstances learning new cases from experience can
work and under which circumstances it will not work.
While educators often understand the significance of presenting cases to their students, they often fail to
understand the significance of the ordering and timing of the cases they present. So, business and law
schools which use case methods of teaching fail to recognize the errors they make in case selection, case
size, case ordering, and other factors that severely affect students' abilities to absorb the material. The
goal, after all, is that students remember the cases, storing them in a way that assures their retrieval at a
relevant time later in life. In order for this to happen, particular attention must be paid to the memory
issues that mitigate their absorption.
The key error that most case-organized courses make is the preference for temporal ordering over
thematic ordering. Temporal ordering of cases occurs when cases are presented in a serial order
determined by the time in history when the case actually occurred. This is the worst possible ordering of
cases that could exist because it totally ignores the issues of partial matching of prior cases that enables
new cases to be stored in terms of the expectation failures of old cases since no expectation failures
occur.
Creating properly organized courses based on cases depends on making sure that each case sets up the
next. That is, every case needs to provide its understander with new expectations, some of which fail in
subsequent cases. It is easy to misunderstand the concept of cases setting up cases. Why couldn't the case
of what happened in 1810 set up the case of what happened in 1815? Isn't that one case setting up
another? Of course it is in the temporal sense, but it might not at all be a set up in the thematic sense. The
issue is whether the material in the second case builds on the expectations set up in the prior case by
confirming some and violating others. This distinction, between cases that build on each other and those
that merely follow each other, is central to the goal of having a student will remember not only the cases
but also the principles those cases exemplify.
There are many possible orderings of cases and decisions on what makes cases appropriate besides
temporal ordering that are of concern here. In general, any syntactic ordering or selection criteria (e.g.,
one from this type and one from that type, or all the cases that involve fire engines) will make for a
course that violates the principles that underlie memory's ability to absorb new information. The ordering
and selection must be made according to the following maxims:
1. No case before its time
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