Comparing the Use of Case Studies and Application Questions in Preparing Special Education Professionals

Abstract

There has been growing interest and increasing use of case study (CS) materials in teacher education. Yet efforts to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of CS have been scarce. We compared instructional effectiveness of CS to another commonly used discussion strategy, an application question (AQ) method, with graduate students enrolled in a preservice teacher training course, using a repeated measures experimental design. Our specific focus was facilitation of the application of knowledge. Dependent measures included group scores on discussion guides, group discussion time, individual midterm quiz scores, and student satisfaction ratings. There were no significant differences between two discussion methods in midterm quiz scores, which was the measure of delayed application, and in the student satisfaction ratings; however, the AQ groups obtained higher scores on the discussion guides, the measure of immediate application, and took less time to complete the discussion activity than did the CS groups. Implications of these findings are discussed.