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Skeletal Cases
Want to develop students' investigatory skills?
Then instead of presenting complete case-studies, provide only the initial
"presenting information", and only add to it in response to their questions.
There are a number of variations on the theme:
-
Background: Provide just the superficial
information with which a student might be confronted on first acquaintance with the
situation. Feed in additional background only if asked about it: this is useful for fairly
basic professional skills of gathering data on cases. After a set period of time or number
of questions, see how efficiently the students have got at the important material.
- Investigation: A more sophisticated
variation, perhaps starting from a higher information base, is to offer to answer
questions, but only when the student explains why she is asking. This
identifies the issue of testing hypotheses, and the question of what evidence might be
gathered in order to test an hypothesis. It applies clearly to medical diagnosis, but it
could also apply to fault-finding in a computer network, or a car engine.
- Potential accounts: Almost the reverse
strategy, particularly useful on in-service courses with practitioners who are locked into
recipes of the order of "When such-and-such happens, I always...": outline the
presenting situation and asked them to multiply as many potential explanations as
possible, before eliminating any of them. This is a good exercise for the divergent thinkers in
the group, and for any occasion when you wish to encourage what John Keats called
"negative capability"—the art of not jumping to conclusions, but tolerating
uncertainty and confusion where necessary.
- Raw data: a variant on the above is to start
with raw statistical or documentary data.
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