Case for Case Studies in Water Resources Planning and Management Education

Case studies are used infrequently in engineering education, except perhaps as occasional anecdotes or “war stories” told by instructors. Yet there appears to be surging interest in case studies as a pedagogical tool to provide students with active and discovery-based learning experiences. Through case studies, students may actively acquire information, collaborate with others in problem definition, develop an investigation strategy, choose among alternative problem solving approaches, and negotiate or attempt to convince others of their conclusions. The surging interest is understandable when one contrasts these activities with the more traditional “lecture, learn, and test” classroom regimen.

Business, law, and medical education have long traditions of using real or simulated case studies to teach students. The Harvard Business School is widely noted for pioneering the case method of instruction (Christensen 1986), and the college now develops approximately 350 cases each year for business courses worldwide. A typical business student may be exposed to as many as 500 cases in an MBA program (Bhandari and Erickson 2005). In the business field, cases are typically real and are presented as dilemmas or puzzles to be solved. Students are given narratives describing an individual, agency, or business with a problem, along with quantitative background information in the form of charts, graphs, and tables. The instructor acts mainly as a facilitator to help students understand the facts of the case, analyze the problem, and present possible solutions. There is seldom a single, “correct” solution; rather, emphasis is placed on the decision-making approach and on evaluating the pros and cons of a range of reasonable solutions.

Now, engineering instructors may well argue that business is not at all like engineering practice, where analysis and design are founded upon scientific principles and a well-defined knowledge base. Following the business education model, how can an instructor emphasize the human condition and various subjective views in teaching students to calculate energy loss in a pipe? Certainly, lecture and traditional problem-solving exercises have their place in engineering curricula, but the potential benefits of case studies should not be so easily dismissed. (For environmental engineering, they might be literally “poo poo-ed,” however!) Case studies can stimulate interest in a subject, foster motivation to learn, and help students to understand the relevance of the subject in a larger societal and economic context. Furthermore, case studies can promote deeper learning and development of Bloom (1956) higher-order thinking skills: comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. If case studies are used in group work, as they frequently are, students receive the added benefits of collaborative learning. These skills seems critically important in a field such as water resources planning and management, in which professionals work in multidisciplinary teams along with diverse groups of stakeholders and consider incommensurate goals to arrive at good (not “correct”) solutions.

For brevity, I would like to mention two more potential benefits of case studies. First, case study use provides a clear means to engage industry and government in university education. Many practitioners express a desire to contribute to formal university education, and many instructors recognize the value of bringing practical experience into the classroom, but what usually results in a typical engineering course is just one or two “show and tell” presentations by a practicing engineer (often acting as a substitute when the instructor is traveling). One consultant also liked the idea of case studies as a good use for his project reports “in danger of disintegrating on the shelf” (C.D.D. Howard, personal communication). Second, since cases have strong appeal to students who are turned off by lecture courses focusing on knowledge and content rather than on higher-level learning skills, the use of case studies may encourage more undergraduate students to further their education through graduate study. There may even be some benefits in terms of increasing the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives in the profession, since those of us who teach predominantly through lecture tend to be Darwinian survivors of the lecture-based system.

One disadvantage of using case studies is that a significant amount of time and effort may be required to develop and teach a good case study. In advocating case study use in environmental engineering, Bhandari and Erickson (2005) estimated that the average time to develop a case may range from 1 to 4 months. At the extreme, developing a good case may require extensive research, interviews, and perhaps even thousands of dollars of investment. On the other hand, some instructors have noted success in simply using newspaper clippings and a carefully crafted set of questions to lead students into a case study. Similarly, the time required to cover a case may range from a portion of a class period for a simple case to several class periods for a more elaborate case requiring extensive reading and data analysis. (For efficiency, one might consider a graduate course in which students develop potential case studies for undergraduate students.)

For instructors wishing to use case studies for the first time, an increasing number of resources are becoming available. An Engineering Case Library (ECL 2005) is maintained jointly by the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Carleton University, under the auspices of the American Society for Engineering Education. (This program was initiated at Stanford University in 1964 with funding from the National Science Foundation.) The Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors also recently issued a call for case studies and a proposal to compile environmental engineering cases for use by educators, as done by the Harvard Business School. And last but not least, ASCE has established a task committee to develop and disseminate a set of environmental and water resource systems engineering case studies for classroom use.

This brings us to a word from our sponsor. The ASCE Environmental and Water Resource Systems Education Task Committee is currently developing a set of case studies involving the application of systems analysis methods to water resource planning and management problems, and additional contributions are welcome. Some of the case study topics that have been developed or suggested for development are as follows:

For each case study, students are given background information pertinent to a particular (current or past) water management issue, including social, economic, political, geographic, hydrologic, and other natural resource information. A series of related exercises is provided, consisting of additional research, team participation, and computer exercises. Through computer exercises, students gain familiarity with technologies commonly used in water resources planning and management, including simulation and optimization models and geographic information systems. To help with adoption in a course, instructors will also be provided with learning objectives for each case study, suggested courses and levels (freshman through graduate), prerequisite courses, type of activity (individual or group), and suggested assessment methods.

Assessing the impact of case studies can be challenging since higher-level learning is not as easy to measure as knowledge and content-based learning. Furthermore, students exposed to problem-based learning may be slightly less confident of their learning than students who complete a traditional lecture and test-based course, even though the problem-based learners do markedly better on functional measures. Case studies also have an affective as well as a content dimension, and it is important to ask questions such as, “Was the case engaging,” “Did it cause students to think,” and “Could they relate to the issues?” Again, the fledgling case instructor need not despair, as assessment resources are available from a variety of sources, including the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science at the State University of New York-Buffalo and the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton University.

While significant effort may be required to develop good case studies, use cases in the classroom, and evaluate higher-level learning, the benefits of discovery-based and cooperative learning seem to outweigh the costs. This is particularly true in a field such as water resources planning and management, in which a host of social, economic, and environmental issues must be considered along with technical analysis and design to arrive at good solutions. Hopefully, cooperation among university instructors, students, and practitioners can reduce the overall effort required to increase the use and benefits of case studies in our educational system.