Teaching Educational Law and Policy Through Case Method Instruction: A Mixed-Methods Study in Taiwan Higher Education

Educational law and policy courses ask students to reason with abstract statutes, institutional histories, and professional dilemmas, yet students often experience such material as distant from practice. This mixed-methods study examined an 18-week case method redesign of an undergraduate educational law and policy course in Taiwan. Fifty-four students enrolled in the course, and 52 matched pre-post questionnaires were analyzed. Quantitative evidence came from a 35-item motivation questionnaire adapted from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, measuring value, expectancy, and affective orientation; qualitative evidence came from classroom observations, course artifacts, rubric-rated final presentations, instructor reflections, and six post-course semi-structured interviews. Paired-samples t tests showed significant pre-post gains in value, expectancy, and affective orientation, with the largest change indicating reduced course-related anxiety. Qualitative analysis suggested that students experienced case method instruction as most useful when authentic cases were embedded in a designed learning environment that provided background-knowledge scaffolds, guided disciplinary discussion, and cross-jurisdictional comparison. Because the study used a one-group pretest-posttest design in a single course, the findings do not establish causal effects of CMI. Its contribution lies in identifying provisional design principles—combining authentic cases with background-knowledge scaffolds, guided disciplinary discussion, and cross-jurisdictional comparison—for making abstract legal and policy content more usable in professional reasoning.