Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains - Philippe ...

1.2 Cases in Case-Based Instruction
The use of case-based instruction is believed to help students develop skills of critical
analysis and problem solving [7, 8, 14], encourage the development of higher order
cognitive thinking, increase technical rational thinking [15] and provide a safe
environment to practice and discuss [2]. Yet empirical data to demonstrate transfer
and impact on learners is scarce [16].
Proponents of case-based instruction do not seem to make a clear distinction
between what constitutes a case and how cases are used. By contrasting teacher
education to other field that use cases, Carter [17] tries to get a better definition of
what a case is or isn’t. In earlier work she has defined cases as stories that “consist of
events, characters, and settings arranged in a temporal sequence implying both
causality and significance” [18]. Later, she proposes four different views of what a
case can be: a case as exemplar, a case as problem situation, a case as a story and a
case as a narrative. The distinction she makes can be useful but she fails to give
definition or concrete examples to differentiate them and focuses on underlining
differences in how these different types of cases are used. The difference between
cases as exemplars and problems is not clear but she refers to them as conventional
uses of cases where the cases are subordinate to propositional knowledge and where
cases are made to be clear and classified as a piece of the curriculum. She refers to
narratives and stories as more authentic and rich, yet the difference between the case
as story and case as narrative is not clear. Narratives are lived experiences or
personal life stories but the definition of cases as stories does not exclude narratives.
She refers to “storied knowledge” arguing about the autonomous status of story as an
expression of knowledge, and argues that we should not try to get the story to fit into
the curriculum; we should free the stories of the framework. Her argument
demonstrates a dichotomous conception of cases as either free form narrative or rigid
exemplar made to “fit” the curriculum.
1.3 Case-Based Reasoning
Using Expert Decision Maps 70
Case-based reasoning (CBR) is referred to as an approach to learning and problem
solving [19]. Contrasting with holistic and nonspecific views of cases as stories that
should be completely free of form, researchers in artificial intelligence have tried to
define and build intelligent systems using very structured cases. In the CBR
approach, a case is a structured way of representing a story or a problem. Kolodner
[20] compares these “real” or “made-up” cases to movie scripts which include “a
setting, the actors and their goals, a sequence of events, the expected results, what
actually happened (if it is known), and explanations linking outcomes to goals and
means” (p.226). CBR comes from research in cognitive science and artificial
intelligence. This approach originates from computer scientists [21] who were trying
to design intelligent systems that could behave more like experts. Proponents of this
approach see the mind as a record of thousands of “cases” [22-24] and propose that
humans make sense of new cases by comparing and matching characteristics and
features of these new cases with previous ones. Through experience humans can
generalize from cases and create scripts and schema. Authors in CBR literature use