ABSTRACT
The notion of cases arises in various guises in a number of areas of research within Cognitive Science. Recent theories of situated cognition, for example, have argued that learning occurs most felicitously in circumstances that most closely resemble those of eventual use (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Norman, 1993). Furthermore, research in analogical problem-solving has shown that transfer is improved when the similarity between training problems and target problems is increased (Gick & Holyoak, 1980). Both positions, therefore, support the argument that instruction based on cases is more likely to be usefully applied in practice than instruction based strictly on abstracted principles. Others have gone further to argue that learning through exposure to real cases is not only beneficial, but essential for attaining expertise. For example, Dreyfus has asserted (Dreyfus & Dreyfus 1986) that advanced stages of expertise can only be achieved through practice with a large number of cases. Moreover, advocates of Case-Based Reasoning (Kolodner, 1994) have argued that the process of acquiring expertise is really one of accumulating experience with a succession of real cases and properly indexing these experiences for later retrieval.
