Evaluating the effectiveness of situational case-based teaching: a view of concept mapping

Situational case-based teaching is one of promising teaching strategies in engineering education, e.g., computer science and information security. This strategy is student-centered and can reinforce practical experience and context-aware problem solving. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework by applying concept mapping to address the great concern of comparing different teaching strategies. Specifically, the proposed evaluation framework consists of four phases, i.e., concept map construction, concept map converting, multidimensional scaling and clustering analysis. The evaluating results based on concept mapping over a demo course reveal the following two statements: (a) Situational cases can help learners learn important concepts and organize their relationships with the goal of practical problem solving in engineering courses; (b) Compared with the conventional lecture strategy, the situational case-based one is helpful for learners to achieve high-level cognitive outcomes, e.g., antagonistic thinking.