Putting Case-Based Instruction Into Context: Examples From Legal and Medical Education

Abstract

Recently, educational theorists have begun to emphasize the importance of situating instruction in meaningful contexts in order to recreate some of the advantages of apprenticeship learning. Cognitive apprenticeship and anchored instruction are two approaches to instruction that provide guidance for teaching in contextualized ways. Cognitive apprenticeship emphasizes the social context of instruction and draws its inspiration from traditional apprenticeships. Anchored instruction provides a model for creating problem contexts that enables students to see the utility of knowledge and to understand the conditions for its use. Together, these two complementary approaches provide a framework for thinking about apprenticeship learning and how it might be transferred to the classroom. Interestingly, authors who have written about cognitive apprenticeships and anchored instruction have made only passing reference to the case method of legal and business education and the problem-based learning approach to medical education, two well-established methods of instruction that are also based on apprenticeship learning and the study of authentic problems or cases. The detailed description of these two approaches to instruction in this article provides a rich source of information about how to create contextualized learning environments in school settings, and demonstrates that case-based instruction can take on different forms and be used in different domains. Each approach is evaluated employing a framework synthesized from cognitive apprenticeship and anchored instruction; the results of this analysis are used to suggest research questions for case-based instruction as it is currently practiced and areas in which further research is needed to refine educational theories.