Pathology Case Study Redesign
At Joyce University, case studies are used in many classes to help students apply material prior to class. I recently assisted in a project to change the format of the case studies to make them more focused on learning objectives and in student knowledge.
In the original case studies, students were presented with a scenario and asked a series of open ended essay questions.
This led to several issues. The first was students often did not write the intended answers, they were lacking in depth, incorrect or copied from the internet.
The second issue was that when asked about the effectiveness of the case studies, students did not think these contributed to learning.
To solve these issues, we rebuilt the case studies as canvas assignments.
The first change that was made was to separate the questions and the case study. This was made to model what the charting systems that will be used in health care facilities look like.
We also changed and varied the types of questions that were asked. There were two reasons we made this change. The first is to match the national nursing licensing exam, which included adding many question types like hotspots, essays, ordering, select all that apply, etc. It also helped the students narrow down and understand the important concepts we were trying to have them study and focus on.