THE CASE METHOD USED INDUCTIVELY AS AN INSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH TO CREATE COGNITIVE SCHEMA IN UNDERGRADUATE NURSING STUDENTS.
Contributors: University of San Francisco.
Published: 1996
Number of pages: 255
Subjects: Education, Curriculum and Instruction.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: Case studies are used extensively in professional education, yet few studies have been undertaken to determine the best educational format for case study use. This study investigated the effects of two instructional delivery methods on instructional outcomes through differing levels of cognitive elaboration. It tested the proposition that more elaboration would occur resulting in more information acquired and retained when subjects received instructional case studies used inductively rather than deductively.

Hypothesis 1 and 2 directly tested the effects of type of instruction on knowledge acquisition, measured immediately after treatment, and knowledge retention, measured one week after treatment. No statistically or practically significant difference was found between the two groups on either of the knowledge tests. Both groups did show significant within-group differences from knowledge test #1 to knowledge test #2.

A third hypothesis predicted that the subjects who received instructional case studies used inductively would engage in greater cognitive elaboration than the deductive group, as demonstrated by the number of appropriate responses on a free-recall, controlled stimulus word association test. This hypothesis was not supported by the data.

A fourth research question attempted to describe the most frequently used words by the experimental and control groups on the word association tests, and whether those words changed from word association test #1 to word association #3. The inductive group maintained a word list including treatment, diagnosis and symptoms, and the deductive group reverted to basic anatomy and physiology terms.

The author hoped that the present study would provide some empirical evidence for the superiority of one type of case study method over another. The deductive and inductive groups both demonstrated higher scores on the knowledge retention test than on the knowledge acquisition test immediately after instruction, meaning that both groups stored information about the target concept in memory, and both groups were able to access that information successfully.

This study has demonstrated that given an equal amount of time (one and one-half hours), the inductive group did not demonstrate significantly better knowledge acquisition or retention than the deductive group, but also did not do significantly worse than the deductive group.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-05, Section: A, page: 1951.

Thesis (ED.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO, 1996.

School code: 6019.