Research School Network: Has it really been three decades? – Revisiting CASE* in 2020 A personal journey through 30 years of CASE by Alan Edmiston

* CASE stands for Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education and is an enrichment programme that includes a series of 30 lessons that develop scientific reasoning in Key Stage 3.

For the past two years I have been supporting schools as part of Carmel College’s SSIF (Strategic School Improvement Fund) projects in maths and science. The science strand has seen me visiting twelve schools across the Tees Valley to help them to use something called CASE. This has been a most wonderful time not least because of the large element of déjà vu involved for I myself first started using CASE in 1991! In all of the schools I was able to work with someone who was just like me, all those years ago. The whole experience has been very powerful, for teaching in so many different schools as afforded me some significant insights into the thinking of children and their cognitive needs at the start of their secondary school career. In this blog I will pick out a couple of recent episodes that can be used to highlight the continuing role that CASE has to play in the cognitive development of adolescents.

Very early on in my own CASE teaching I came to realise the simple fact that the words children use to describe their ideas (ratio will be used here as an example) in response to CASE affords you a window into how good their thinking is and therefore how well they might do in a formal written assessment. This in turn should inform your planning of a sequence of activities to support the gaps that emerge as a consequence. In one lesson I was observing, my seating position meant that I had my back to the class and so I was forced to listen to what was being said more than if I had been sitting at the very back of the room. A key feature of CASE is the notion of cognitive conflict i.e. giving the children a problem that cannot easily be solved by any one individual with their current level of thinking. The lesson in question was concerned with proportion as a special case of ratio that requires the pupils to be able to see a common ratio regardless of the individual sizes involved. The pupils were challenged to work out how it is possible to calculate how tall someone is from their forearm length (the actual ratio involved is 1:6 for humans). Behind me two girls were arguing because one of them felt that although her friend got ​“times by six” it would be different for her because she is much taller. In CASE the teacher takes on the role of a facilitator, so rather than jumping in, they orchestrate the feedback so that the idea of ​“we are all times by 6” emerges and the pupils are forced to realise that this is because the relationship between arm length and height, in humans, is a constant one.

Staying with ratio (which is a major strand of CASE ​‘content’) one thing we do is plan a sequence of lessons with teachers to show how CASE is sowing the seeds of the thinking children need to master if they are to succeed in Year 10 and 11, i.e. the type of thinking that underpins the more difficult GCSE questions. CASE uses a Piagetian analysis of demand to highlight the steps that could be taken as they develop their understanding of ratio beyond simple multiplications towards; proportion, scale, compound variables and even equilibria systems. In Piagetian terms most children as they start secondary school are ​‘concrete’ thinkers, i.e. their thinking is linked to the context in which they first encounter the idea. What higher level GCSE performance requires is for pupils to be able to apply the concept into new and unfamiliar contexts, i.e. their thinking about ratio is a tool that can be used to model, compare and explore a whole range of different relationships. 

When looking at the lessons with one group of SSIF teachers we used a thinking scale with statements on proportional reasoning showing increasing complexity of thought from very simple to the most complex. They easily saw how a particular lesson could support the development of thinking but it was the progression document that caused most reflection. Half of those in the room started to realise why so many of their KS4 classes were struggling because from the statements they were able to see that many of these students were thinking in very concrete ways. It was more than the fact that they just could not get it and more to do with the fact that the curriculum they had to ​‘cover’ required a certain level of thinking that these pupils were not able to cope with. Among those present it was suggested that they use the CASE lessons to support the thinking of older students as a way to help them begin to grasp the fact that a sense of ratio allows them to balance equations and also work out the scaling questions they are always asked in Biology. 

I could go on with many more examples of how useful CASE has become to those involved in the training and also how in each school something specific has emerged that has enabled them to personalise CASE to meet their requirements. For example in a local Academy we were working with, after the same lesson on ratio, we used a series of reflective questions to structure the end of lesson plenary. When considering how he would describe what was different today one student replied with: ​“Its metacognition because I have been thinking about my thinking!” You can imagine how chuffed the teachers from that school were and to be honest that was also a first for me as although one of the central pillars of CASE is metacognition, I have never heard a child say it in those three decades.

In others it is about building collaboration, for some dialogue and for others it’s about the teachers professional choice over the direction of the lesson and level of challenge in response to how the pupils engage with the stimulus present within each lesson. It is also worth pointing out that these schools are not alone in their growing realisation of how CASE can help for many other are revisiting CASE and CAME in this country and beyond. I think this is largely in response to a curriculum that increasing seems to neglect the child and their development in favour of a linear model of progression that does not take real children into account.

Alan Edmiston is an Educational consultant with the Carmel Education Trust and is working alongside us in the Research School.

Contact Alan via Research@​carmel.​org.​uk