It Is More about Telling Interesting Stories: Use Explicit Hints in Storytelling to Help College Students Solve Ill-defined Problems

A team consisting of three faculty members from Agricultural Economics, Agribusiness management, and Food Science with two research assistants at Penn State University has been working for three years on creating a food product case library for a problem-based learning and case-based instruction course. With the assistance of experts from the food manufacturing and retailing industries we collected approximately 110 stories related to food product development. These stories were organized and stored into a database (a Case Library) for faculty and students to use in a case-based instruction course. An earlier research study conducted by our team members found evidence that a Case Library with stories did affect students ’ decisions of making multiple-choice tests concerning ill structured problems (Hernandez-Serrano, 2001). Then, we encountered that students had difficulty making on-point connections between stories and target problems at hand. Our goal is to help learners better understand the stories while enhancing their abilities to make analogies. This has raised the following questions: What should we do to achieve this goal? What kind of story-indexing strategies will help students understand the stories better? Will surface level indices (such as company name, product category, product name, and development process) help students recall similar features easier? Will a deeper level of indices (such as theme, goal, plan, results, an