Should Case Materials Precede or Follow Lectures?

Abstract

This paper examines a fundamental question faced by all accounting educators who use accounting case analyses alongside lecture-based instruction: Does it matter whether cases precede or follow a lecture? Results from a controlled experiment indicate that students' case analysis performance is initially enhanced when a lecture precedes a case, because the lecture equips students with knowledge to apply to the case and it constrains the number of irrelevant ideas that students apply to the case. However, there is a drawback to positioning a lecture before the first case—it constrains the number of relevant ideas that students generate themselves to apply to the case. In addition, the short-term benefits of positioning a lecture before case analyses disappear when students analyze a second case. Specifically, we find that performance on a second case is significantly better when students have previously learned in an environment that places the first case before the lecture. Our evidence suggests that these case-before-lecture students are more likely to engage their pre-lecture knowledge and the knowledge obtained from the lecture when analyzing the second case. Practical implications for using cases with lectures are discussed.

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