Original case by Barbara Duch

Modified by John C. Cavanaugh

University of Delaware

Sarah Swift, an Assistant Professor in the fourth year of her probationary period in State University's Accounting Department, was dissatisfied with the way she taught Intermediate Accounting, a required course for all accounting majors. She felt that students were not really understanding the basic concepts and were unable to apply those concepts to novel problems. Instead, she thought they memorized rules and tried to "pattern match" in order to solve problems.

After attending several faculty development workshops on teaching, which she was encouraged to do by her Chair, Sarah decided to use problem-based learning (PBL) in her course. She had heard about it from other senior faculty member in her department who used it exclusively. She thought that this approach would challenge students by having them work in groups solving "real world" problems in order to learn accounting principles. Students would be responsible for researching their questions (or learning issues), finding appropriate materials and resources relevant to the problem, and sharing their information with their peers. Sarah thought that students would be more interested and motivated by these contextually-rich problems and group assignments than they had been when she only lectured.

At the end of the semester, Sarah thought that although there were some rough spots, the PBL approach worked reasonably well. Students performed much better with novel problems and seemed to understand the concepts completely for the first time in her teaching career. Sarah liked how she had to think through her course in new ways. So she was very surprised when her course evaluations indicated that students were unhappy. Students said that they "should not have to teach themselves—that was what the faculty were paid to do" and they were concerned that "this group stuff does not prepare us for the CPA exam." Overall, Sarah’s teaching evaluations were lower than they had been previously. She also learned that some letters of complaint had gone to the Dean, who had contacted the Chair to report that "students are not learning in Sarah’s class" and that it was the Chair’s responsibility to "fix the problem."

Sarah was worried that her experiment with PBL would hurt her annual evaluation, and could negatively affect her upcoming promotion and tenure case. She was nervous as she headed to the Chair’s office in answer to a request for a meeting.

1. What does learning mean to you?
2. What is the problem from your perspective?
3. What course of action would you advocate? Why?