Abstract:

Case studies are a popular way of imparting knowledge at universities and colleges. There are many different approaches to the structure of case studies. Students usually work on the cases independently and then present the results. Whether the individual students understood the case study's content and how difficult it was for them to do so is often not considered. This short paper discusses how the content should be designed in the form of knowledge nuggets in a case to keep the students' cognitive load as low as possible. The cognitive load is based on Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory from 1988. The total cognitive load results from three individual loads: the intrinsic cognitive load, the extraneous cognitive load, and the germane cognitive load (Sweller & Chandler, 1994). According to Bailey, Zalfan, and Davis (2006), knowledge nuggets consist of tasks that students undertake in some context to achieve specific learning outcomes. To design a knowledge nugget, the subject area, level of difficulty, skills or knowledge required, and the environment in which the activity takes place should first be defined. Knowledge nuggets should be designed for a predetermined teaching or learning approach.

Thus, an exploratory case study based on Yin (2018) was planned to light the topic often very hard to grasp: business continuity management based on ISO 22301. For each of the case-parts, within the case study, the authors designed two knowledge nuggets with the same content and structure but with different predicted cognitive load. The knowledge nuggets structure was based on Felder and Silverman's 1988 Learning Style Model; the cognitive load was based on Sweller's 1988 Cognitive Load Theory. Both versions of the knowledge nuggets were designed to match students' often-preferred learning styles mentioned in studies (active, sensing, visual and sequential). Besides, care was taken to keep the cognitive load as low as possible in the first variant and to neglect the effort in the second variant. The expectation is that a knowledge nugget should be presented so that the extrinsic cognitive load is as low as possible. That depends on how the information is presented. The intrinsic cognitive load, which depends on the information's complexity, can be influenced depending on the learning goal. However, the goal should be to achieve a high germane cognitive load, which reflects the capacities of working memory for understanding the information. However, the knowledge nuggets have been finally designed but not yet applied due to the lack of possibility (COVID-19) to test the existing knowledge nuggets. Therefore, we could not execute the empirical part yet. Nevertheless, this conference submission should be seen as a pre-study and a way of receiving input concerning structure, content, and empirical methods

Keywords:

Knowledge nuggets, case study, business continuity management, learning style model, cognitive load theory.