Is Your Case Study Giving "Meh"?
Students rated 34 classroom activities. Two features went with the most engagement: authenticity and the right level of detail.
Early signal Single study, 34 activities · 557 students · 30 min to revise one case · Any year
About this evidence
- Evidence strength
- Early signal
- Source type
- Single study · 34 activities · 557 students
- Design
- Correlational · student self-report · one Australian university
- What we read
- Full text (accepted manuscript)
- Works for
- Any
- Time to try
- 30 min to revise one case
- Level
- Any year
We all know the moment. You hand out the case study you spent your Sunday polishing, and the room goes quiet. Not the good, thinking kind of quiet. The "is this for marks?" kind. (Second only to the silence when you announce the consolidation chapter.)
What they did
Lara Molendijk, Ross Taplin and Andrew Brennan wanted evidence, not just advice, about what makes experiential learning activities (ELAs) such as case studies work. The literature already lists plenty of "best practice" features. What it lacked, they argue, was empirical evidence of how much each feature actually improves engagement.
So they compared student engagement across 34 activities across seven compulsory courses in an Australian Bachelor of Commerce (Accounting) degree, in one semester of 2020. The activities varied on six characteristics that the literature claims are beneficial. Students completed a questionnaire, analysed with regression and content analysis.
What they found
Engagement was highest when an activity was authentic and contained the right level of detail. The evidence for three other features was weaker. Personal relevance and the learning cycle were borderline on their own and faded once authenticity was taken into account, and critical thinking wasn't statistically significant.
A bonus finding that isn't emphasised in the existing ELA literature: how the activity was run (discussion, group work, pacing) came up again and again in students' own explanations of what engaged or bored them, though it wasn't part of the statistical analysis.
Whether a case was recent made no detectable difference. The authors suggest it matters more that a scenario is relevant to students today than that it happened very recently, though they note they measured 'current' only by the scenario's date. The authors note that some of these characteristics are difficult to quantify.
The reality check: this is a correlational study. The activities weren't randomly varied, so it shows which features went together with higher engagement, not that adding them causes it. Engagement was student self-report. It was one university, one semester in 2020, no control group, and it measured engagement, not learning.
You still need cases that make sense in your students' world. "The right level of detail" is a dial: too thin and there's nothing to analyse; too thick and students drown before they start thinking. Your students' reactions are part of the design process.
Try this in class next week
- Authenticity audit: swap the fictional "Company XYZ" in one case for a real, well-known company or event your students recognise. In the study, "authentic" meant exactly that.
- Detail dial: ask three students to read the case for two minutes and tell you what's confusing or missing. Trim or add accordingly.
- Make it personal: reframe one case around a business your students actually use, like a spaza shop (an informal neighbourhood convenience store in South Africa), a minibus-taxi association (a local commuter-transport cooperative) or a campus coffee cart.
- Relevance before recency: don't burn a weekend chasing this week's headlines if an older, relatable scenario does the job.
- Facilitation matters: try "think, pair, then cold-call a pair" in place of "any questions?"
These suggestions are ours, not the authors'.
After you try it, ask yourself…
- Which single detail did students ask about most? That's your detail dial.
- Did the same case land differently with a different facilitation move?
- Is your case relevant to your students' world, even if it isn't from this year?
Source card
Molendijk, L., Taplin, R. H., & Brennan, A. J. (2025). Empirical evidence of factors to improve student engagement from experiential learning activities. Issues in Accounting Education, 40(2), 67–82. Read the paper (doi.org) · What we read: full text (author's accepted manuscript, ECU repository).
Get next week's ideas in your inbox.
Four evidence-based reads for accounting lecturers, every week. Confirm by email; unsubscribe any time. Prefer feeds? RSS.