Does More Ownership Reduce Stress?

This article describes a method for engaging students in case study creations. The reason for coming up with this type of assignment was to provide students with more ownership in their lea... See More

This article describes a method for engaging students in case study creations. The reason for coming up with this type of assignment was to provide students with more ownership in their learning which would hopefully increase their confidence and responsibility in a challenging and, at times, overwhelming course. The students completed a unit on the nervous system; then they were assigned case study groups of three to four students. These were randomly assigned groups. The case study scenarios had the same skeletal beginning: A patient is admitted to the ER or visits the doctor with neurological ailments. The patient provides a history for the doctor and a physical exam is conducted of the patient. The patient’s history provides necessary details to help students diagnose the patient. Some class time was provided for this assignment, but a majority of it was to be completed outside of class. Students practiced solving a couple of sample cases and were given the outline for case solving (which is included in the article) before creating their own cases. There was a concern that students would not be prepared enough to generate meaningful and realistic case studies; however, that is not what happened. Using a Likert scale survey for the first two parts of the questionnaire, researchers examined how creating cases related to a general understanding of the nervous system, and they examined how relevant the other course materials were to generating cases. In the third set of questions students were asked about the overall experience in the generation of case scenarios. It is an interesting reading and the results suggested that this was a viable way to assess student learning on a very complex unit of study.