Case-Based Reasoning Meets Learning by Doing

Goal-Based Scenarios:
2. Any new case must violate expectations from prior cases
3. Cases should relate to actions
4. Cases should have the potential to change behavior
We will now consider these maxims one at a time.
1. No case before its time
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It is tempting to tell children stories that are of general interest. Thus, one can tell of George Washington
chopping down the cherry tree or of Paul Revere's ride because these are stories of the culture to which
children can relate. But when we consider that we are trying to do more than entertain, such stories need
to be more than simply appealing to children. They also must be germane. The question is, of course,
germane to what?
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the issue here is with reference to the story "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."
Typically, parents tell this story when a child has complained about some actions on the part of another
child when it turns out that there really wasn't much of a problem and the complainer had exaggerated or
just plain lied. This story is not such a fascinating story, and probably is told by parents at just the time
that they perceive that it is needed.
This pattern of just in time story telling is one that parents and teachers know to be the right thing to do in
ordinary life situations, but it is violated all the time in educational settings. This happens because
someone simply wants to tell a story for some reason, or more commonly, because that story has been
mandated to be told by some curriculum committee as some specified time in the school year. When this
happens two bad things occur.
First, the listener is often bored. Frequently, listeners find themselves distracted when they have no need
for what they are hearing. One must be ready to hear a story, to receive a lesson, or to read a book. The
same message told before its time is often completely ignored by a person who might revel in that story at
some later time (or might have loved it at some earlier time.) If we want listeners to remember what they
are being told, they must want to hear what they are being told. "Want" means in this case, the presence
of an active expectation, question, or curiosity about some life strategies that happens to be addressed by
the new story (or case).
The second problem is that the listener, having no clear need for the story, is left to determine the point of
the story for himself. This means that a listener is left thinking about why George didn't like trees or
wanted to eat cherry pie, or why Paul Revere didn't use his car or what the roads were like in those days.
While it is fine for listeners to speculate on aspects of a case that they find interesting, the intended
"lesson" of the story fails to come across and, more important, the entire story is unlikely to be
remembered at all unless the listener does a remarkably good job of creating his own idiosyncratic lesson.
This same problem occurs in business situations when a classic case is told to an audience that could not
possibly appreciate its point. Left to memorize the point, the trainees have no clue what to do with this
memorized point and they fail to link it to actual behaviors that they have had on the job. Sometimes they
cannot do this because the company that is training them is giving them training prior to their doing the
job, which considering what I have been saying here is absolutely ludicrous from a memory and
expectation point of view. How can they learn something that relates in no way to any expectation that
they have ever formed? But even when expectations have been formed and when a trainee has worked on
the job, the new cases that he hears about often relate to situations in some future job for which he has no
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1/22/2010