The Role of Stories in Learning: CaseBased Reasoning

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The Role of Stories in Learning Case-Based
Reasoning
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• Stories are the oldest and most natural form of
  sense making. Stories are the means by which
  human beings give meaning to their experience of
  temporality and personal actions
• Cultures have maintained their existence through
  different types of stories - myths, fairy tales,
  and histories.
• Humans appear to have an innate ability and
  predisposition to organize and represent their
  experiences in the form of stories.
• To be part of a culture, it is necessary to be
  connected to the stories that abound in that
  culture (Bruner, 1990)

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Functions of storytelling

• a method of negotiating and renegotiating
  meanings that allows us to enter into others'
  realms of meaning through the messages they utter
  in their stories
• helps us find our place in a culture
• assists us in the sharing of our human diversity
• helps us to learn, to conserve memory, or to
  alter the past
• allows us to explicate who we are and what we do
  and to interpret the same from others

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Storytelling

• assists us in understanding human action,
  intentionality and temporality by facilitating
  the understanding of the past events of ones
  life and the planning of future actions
• permits us to remember the unusual (as when we
  recount a traumatic incident or a pleasant memory
• aids us in the building of persuasive arguments
• helps us to gain experiences vicariously
• helps us to articulate our identity

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Why are stories not accepted in education?

• Traditionally not acceptable form of logic
• Too elementary for nomological explanations
• Too dependent on context and voice not objective
  enough
• Logical exposition preferred form of scientific
  discourse applies formal proofs
• Education wanted to appear scientific in its
  discourse, but
• narrative form of explanation preferred by just
  plain folks (Lave, 1988) in problem solving

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Paradigm shift in social sciences

• cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy,
  literary theory, education, humanities,
  anthropology, history have begun to accept
  interpretative approaches to research as
  legitimate means of understanding
• new concern with meaning-making
• stories function to organize elements of
  awareness into meaningful episodes

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Workplace Learning

• practitioners prefer to work with narrative
  knowledge when asked to provide explanations
• They work with case histories and use narrative
  explanations to understand why the people they
  work with behave the way they do
• architects, engineers and psychotherapists most
  often encoded their experiences in narrative form
  by using case histories and narrative
  explanations (Schön, 1993), so storytelling
  represents and substitutes for firsthand
  experience

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Stories in the Workplace (Henning)

• promote an ongoing discourse between technician,
  machines, products and people
• afforded technicians a means to form and express
  their identity as technicians and to assist
  others in their initiation
• supported initiation, identity formation, their
  sense of pride, and in general about the drama of
  facing responsibility and unusual and difficult
  situations
• cohered community of practice

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Stories in the Workplace (Orr)

• photocopy technicians used narrative forms as
  primary element of practice
• explaining and arriving at diagnoses
• teaching and learning new methods
• dealing with uncertainty
• changing perspectives on problems
• warning about failures
• providing solutions
• expanding the problem space
• finding causes to problems
• illustrating a point for challenging a fellow
  technician
• building confidence as problem solvers

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Stories and Problem Solving

• fire commanders, tank commanders, and system
  designers) relied more heavily on cases based on
  past experience than on abstract principles when
  making decisions with a high degree of
  uncertainty (Klein Calderwood)
• car mechanics frequently use their experiences
  and those of others when wrestling with new
  problems (Lancaster Kolodner)
• GTE engineers troubleshooting phone switching
  networks used stories (Kopeikina)

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Assumptions

• stories can function as a substitute for direct
  experience
• hearing stories is tantamount to experiencing the
  phenomenon oneself
• Given the lack of experiences by novices,
  experiences described in a case library augment
  their repertoire of experiences by connecting
  with those they have experienced

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Case-Based Reasoning (CBR)

• When confronted with a problem, people first try
  to remember a case in which they faced a similar
  situation
• If a similar case is found, they reuse the
  solution to solve the current problem.
• If the current problem is similar, they will
  attempt to adapt the solution to the prior
  experience to the new situation
• If the solution works, they will re-index the
  adapted case and commit it to memory (re-index
  it) as a new story applicable to this particular
  situation.
• If the solution is inadequate, people face
  expectation failure.
• Then most receptive to learning by reading
  stories of how experienced problem solvers
  worked.

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CBR Cycle (Aamondt Plaza, 1996)
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Applications of CBR

• Cognitive task analysis - Collecting stories from
  practitioners used to interpret and understand
  problem-solving tasks in order to design
  instruction
• Used in instruction
• As exemplars of concepts, theories, processes
• As problem cases to be solved (case-based
  teaching)
• As advice for students learning to solve problems

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CBR Example - Parent-teacher Conference
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CBR Example - Turfgrass Management Library
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CBR Example - Turfgrass Management Library
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CBR Example - Food Product Development
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Stories increased problem- solving skills,
addressed misconceptions, and changed attitudes
while solving problems
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CBR Example - KITE
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CBR Example - KITE
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Future Applications

• Inventory of Workplace Problems