Developing and Evaluating Animal Welfare Case Studies for Veterinary Students

Within veterinary education, case studies promote critical thinking and provide an opportunity for students to solve problems they may encounter after graduation. Cases are useful for many disciplines within veterinary medicine, but are particularly beneficial for teaching complex, multidisciplinary topics such as animal welfare. There are several resources within the literature describing methods for creating effective cases for a wide variety of educational disciplines. However, animal welfare educators are not often provided guidance on how to develop their own cases and seldom get the opportunity to receive feedback on cases they have created. The goal of this article is to provide animal welfare educators with a resource they can use when creating their own case studies for veterinary students. Our specific objective is to describe the process used to develop and evaluate farm animal welfare case studies for veterinary students.