Putting Case-Based Instruction Into Context: Examples From Legal and Medical Education

Like domain concepts, strategic concepts pertain to objects and relationships in a class of domains, but unlike domain concepts, they also enable new strategies for solving a class of problems. Generic teleological mechanisms (GTMs) are a class of strategic concepts especially useful in adaptive design. GTMs, such as cascading, feedback, and feedforward, are abstract functional and causal patterns that lead to adaptation strategies for innovative design. We adopt a task-directed approach to learning and describe a model-based method for learning GTMs from design examples. Given a design that contains a pattern previously unknown to the designer and a similar and related design that does not, the method abstracts, indexes, and stores the partern for potential reuse. Pattern abstraction is enabled by structure-behavior-function models that represent functional, causal, topological, and compositional knowledge of device designs.