Experimental case studies to engage higher cognitive skills.

Instructors often find it difficult to write questions that are open ended in nature (4) and that engage students at higher levels of cognitive complexity, for example, Bloom’s taxonomic levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (1). As a consequence, typical pedagogical settings seldom challenge students to engage in learning on those levels. As these higher levels of cognition are generally expected of graduate students, we sought to engage and evaluate graduate students by supplying raw, generally unpublished experimental data from a faculty member as “experimental case studies” requiring their analysis, their creation of tools, and their evaluation against each other and existing literature.