The case method - does learning theory matter?

摘要

Case studies were originally used as a pragmatic attempt to engage the attention of managers through the use of written material on problems or incidents in organizations, written up by academics and then analyzed by course participants. They were implicitly, if not explicitly, anti theory in that they did not offer a complete structured statement of "what ought to be done." They were not based on a theory of learning, except in so far as statements that managers preferred an active to a passive form of learning implied a theory. In a study of how people learn from case studies, Burgoyne and Mumford (2001), we found plenty of material on claims about why the case method was effective, but no significant reference to any learning theory which would help to explain why people learn from cases -and when and why they might not. Indeed, the major work on the classic Harvard use of the method by Barnes et al. (1994) says "We do not have a good way of understanding or evaluating how people learn."