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The Effect of Adopting Case Method with the Modified Consulting Exercise on Students’ Critical Thinking
Disposition and Learning Interest

method teaching.
Besides, prior literature categorizes case reading and team discussion as both “outside
of classrooms” and “priorclass” activities. The underlying assumption is that students
automatically have the ability and willingness to preview the case materials and cooperate

with their teammates. However, based on our teaching experience, without appropriate
guidance and support at first, students participating in a case-based course for the first
time would struggle for unfamiliar instructional methods (Tan, 2019). Consequently, with

little incentive to prepare before the class, these students may skip outside-classroom and
prior-class activities, preventing them from attaining learning gains. Therefore, this study
further proposes that case readings and team discussions be arranged and conducted in the
classroom in the early stage of case-based courses.

2. Design/Methodology

We conduct an experiment adopting a pretest-posttest design in three classes of

managerial accounting courses taught by the same instructor in three separate semesters.
Our participants are undergraduate students at a public university under the technological
and vocational education system in Taiwan.
Furthermore, we identify multivariate outliers with Mahalanobis distance. In
our quasi-experimental designs, there are 23 valid students in both the experimental

group adopting the traditional case method teaching and the other experimental group
adopting CMMCE, and other 24 valid students in the control group adopting the lecture
method, with a total sample of 70. Noteworthily, there are no significant differences in
the distribution of prior knowledge tests, gender, and age among these three groups. We

analyze the data using Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA).
Besides, we also apply several triangulation techniques to improve the internal
validity of our findings. We collect questionnaires in three courses over three semesters.
Apart from the empirical results of the pretest-posttest, this study also presents evidence

of the experimental process for two experimental groups (the modified consulting exercise
versus the traditional case method), the content of unstructured interviews by teaching
assistants, and the anonymous student feedback at the end of the semester.

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