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Rita's Site
Learning, Design, and Technology
University of Georgia
STEP 1: Initial Thoughts
Before I came to UGA, I had several years of work experience as a research assistant and an instructional designer. In 2008, I participted in a huge project in cooperation with Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) to explore how business leaders learn from their experiences in emerging markets, such as China and India. During that project, we interviewed more than 100 middle and high-level managers in China and asked them two questions:
1. What are three most important events in your life so far that help shape who you are as a leader?
2. What did you learn from each of the events?
After we analyze the data we got, we found that most people mentioned failures as one of the most important events for them to learn and failures rank the second in terms of the frequency of being mentioned. And the number one event is challenging tasks. At that time, I thought the results are interesting and personally I agree that I also learn a lot from failures and challenges. But I didn't go deeper to find out more about it.
My Doctoral Research Ideas
STEP 2: Refined Research Idea
When I came to UGA, I got to learn a lot about case-based learning, because one of my advisor Dr. Choi's research interests is case-based learning. We had lots of research meetings together during the first semester and it really helped me to find my research interest and topic.
In order to prepare for one of the meetings, I read an article written by Tawfik and Jonassen about successful and failure-based cases. According to their study, they found that failure-based cases can help students promote their overall argumentation skills, compared with successful cases. It suddenly reminds me of the research project I did years ago. Soon, I figured out that is what I want to do for my PhD study: the role failures play in helping students to promote their problem-solving skills. Since I am interested in case-based learning, I want to pursue a study to see how failure-based cases might help students become better problem solvers.
STEP 3: Road Map
To pursue my research interest, there are several steps for me to take to carry out my study step by step.
First of all, I need to conduct a comprehensive literature review to validate the need to include failure-based cases in the current case-based learning environment. At present, most cases used in instruction are based on successful experiences, fewer failed experiences are included. Although in some fields, experienced practitioners also attach huge importance to failures, they are not often used to develop novices. So I need, first of all, to justify the need for a more balanced case-based learning environment.
Second, I want to explain how failure-based cases work to help students develop their problem-solving skills, especially from cognitive or psychological perspectives. Since there is little literature in this field, my study would not only satisfy my own curiosity, but has the potential to contribute to current literature.
Third, I want to carry out an empirical study to explore the effect of differnet case types on students' problem-solving skills and probably this will be my dissertation topic.