Creative Problem Solving for Marketers

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Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Minna-Maarit Jaskari of the University of Vaasa, Finland, whose article “The Challenge of Assessing Creative Problem Solving in Client-Based Marketing Development Projects: A SOLO Taxonomy Approach” is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Education and now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section.

My paper is about assessing creativity in student work. I work in marketing and business, and we see creativity and innovativeness as extremely important for business. My own interest lies in understanding consumers and providing value creation opportunities for customers. Marketers often need to be creative in order to provide value for customers. This is why we see it is important to teach creativity and creative problem solving in marketing.

Also, from the pedagogical research we know that students tend to learn things they are assessed about. Indeed, if we want to teach creativity, we need to assess it as well. However, this is not easy. Indeed, we quickly need to start thinking, what is creativity in the marketing and business context? In my paper I have focused on creative problem solving. Creativity itself is not enough; in business, we need to be able to implement it and create a marketing concept around it.

My paper focuses on analyzing a very interesting tool, SOLO taxonomy for marketing contexts. The background of the taxonomy goes into cognitive thinking and deep understanding. I have proposed a framework to assess creative problem solving in the marketing context. Such frameworks have not been established to date.

The most surprising result for me was that creativity tied with usefulness really occurred in the higher level of understanding. Even if we know from the literature that creativity requires hard work, this analysis proved the same. For me as a teacher, it gives assurance to actively require students to work hard. Also, the highest level of understanding — the extended abstract level — is actually quite difficult to achieve, if not enhanced by the teacher. The school context is difficult, as in that level the students need to put a lot of effort into their work. And as we know, sometimes the real challenge for the teacher is to motivate the students to work hard, even harder than required.

I hope that marketing educators see the value of SOLO taxonomy in enhancing deep, relational understanding. This is what we should aim for in higher education. Future research could analyze the use of SOLO in other than client-based projects, such as case studies or learning portfolios.

Read “The Challenge of Assessing Creative Problem Solving in Client-Based Marketing Development Projects: A SOLO Taxonomy Approach” online in the Journal of Marketing Education.

Using Blogs to Learn About Groups

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 Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Dr. Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock of VU University Amsterdam. Her paper “Developing Students As Global Learners: ‘Groups in Our World’ Blog,” co-authored by Annika L. Meinecke of TU Braunschweig and Kim K. Smith of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is forthcoming in Small Group Research and now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section.

The intercultural blog project we describe in our paper was the result of a collaboration between Renee A. Meyers and myself. We were both working on group processes in our research and started talking about potential ways in which group interaction processes and norms might differ across cultures. We expected that there should be differences in the ways U.S.-Americans and Germans perceive group interaction and in the ways they behave in group settings – based on our own observations from working together over the years, and based on previous work by Geert Hofstede. However, there was very little in terms of empirical work to substantiate these expectations.

Then the opportunity arose to study these intercultural differences “hands-on,” as we were both simultaneously teaching advanced group processes classes of graduate students in the U.S. and Germany. We were interested in how students perceive intercultural differences in group processes, and how reflecting about these potential differences would help them learn about group processes from different cultural perspectives.

We decided to use a blog for facilitating communication between the two groups of graduate students. The blog helped bridge time zone differences and was easily integrated into the course curriculum.

Literature on the use of blogs for teaching purposes is still rather sparse, so our study was exploratory by nature. The intercultural blog offered a space for students to reflect about things that were discussed in their class. Our case study shows that the students valued the format of blogging as a new learning experience.

In addition to accommodating information exchange across time zones, the blog helped bridge language difficulties. The German students reported that the blog helped them contribute, more so than face-to-face interaction would have, because it gave them the opportunity to think about their questions and answers and to contribute in their own time.

What (positively) surprised us was the ease with which the students used the blog for contributing ideas and discussing different insights and opinions. Both groups of students interacted more on the blog than was necessary by class requirements. The contributions were thoughtful and showed that both groups of students really used the blog as an opportunity to reflect about their experiences and insights into group processes, both within their own culture and across cultures.

Overall, I think the intercultural blog was a great project for getting the graduate students thinking about groups and actively involved in group research. Two of them are now actively pursuing a research career (Annika Meinecke and Kim Smith, who are co-authors on this paper).

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Our positive experience and the favorable student evaluations of using the blog suggest that blogs can be a useful tool for teaching about groups and group processes. However, for successful blog use in teaching, a couple of boundary conditions should be considered. In particular, instructors should incorporate a blog into their curriculum so it is not just an extra task that students have to fulfill, but rather an intentional part of the overall learning process.

To make sure that the blog is actually worthwhile for the students, instructors could incorporate check-ins throughout the semester, where students can summarize the blog activity and have in-class discussions about the posts on the blog.

Directions for future research are manifold. We still know very little about the effects of blog use for teaching purposes, although our case study suggests that this is a fruitful avenue both for teaching effectiveness and for research. First, future research should recruit larger samples to allow for more complex quantitative analyses than we could perform in our case study. In addition, a control group design, where the experimental group would use an online blog whereas the control group would be taught by traditional classroom methods only, could really test the effects of blog use. Variables of interest in this context would include individual as well as group reflexivity, individual learning progress, satisfaction with the learning experience, and learning transfer beyond the classroom. We would expect all of these outcomes to benefit significantly from the use of an online blog, compared to the use of more traditional classroom methods.

Read the paper,”Developing Students As Global Learners: ‘Groups in Our World’ Blog,” online in Small Group Research.

Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Organizational Psychology at VU University Amsterdam. She has published on trust in the workplace, meeting effectiveness, and dynamic behavioral processes in teams. Further research interests include emergent social influence and methodological advances in team interaction analysis.

Teaching Business Students to Think Effectively

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Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Dr. Gerald F. Smith, Professor of Management at the University of Northern Iowa College of Business Administration. His article, “Assessing Business Student Thinking Skills,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Management Education and now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section.

My paper tries to provide a substantive account of thinking skills that can inform their effective teaching.  Although it was written for and published in a management teaching journal, most of the paper’s contents apply to higher education in general.

In writing this paper, I was motivated by dissatisfaction with the very superficial way in which higher order thinking has been conceptualized and taught, in business schools and elsewhere.  The fact that very few students who graduate from college can think effectively is, in my opinion, explained in large part by our simplistic accounts of “critical thinking” and consequently ineffectual efforts to develop student thinking skills.  The article’s contents are based on my teaching and extensive research on higher order thinking.

I don’t think it’s easy to develop students’ critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making skills, but I hope this article inspires faculty, in business schools and elsewhere, to engage more seriously in the teaching of substantive thinking skills, both in dedicated thinking skills courses and across the curriculum.

Read the article, “Assessing Business Student Thinking Skills,” online in the Journal of Management Education, and click here to learn more about the journal.

Does Anonymity Increase Class Participation?

Clickers allow students to answer
questions anonymously in class.
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Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Alyson Latham and N. Sharon Hill, both of The George Washington University, whose paper “Preference for Anonymous Classroom Participation: Linking Student Characteristics and Reactions to Electronic Response Systems” is forthcoming in the Journal of Management Education and now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section.

The purpose of this study was to identify the types of students who respond most positively to the use of an electronic response system (ERS), more commonly known as clickers, to facilitate student participation in the classroom. Student participation in the classroom has been shown to enhance student learning. Clickers are handheld devices that allow students to electronically answer questions presented by the instructor. Their responses are then aggregated via technology and the aggregated results are provided back to the instructor and students within seconds. In this way, clickers allow all students to participate anonymously in class. We were interested in conducting this study because we frequently use clickers in our classes and wanted to know if all students liked using them and found them useful in promoting student engagement and learning. In the study we looked at learner characteristics that influence students’ preference for anonymous classroom participation, and hence, their reaction to using clickers. The results showed that students will tend to prefer anonymity in responding when they are shy and dislike being the center of attention, when they are afraid of giving an incorrect response in front of others, and when their cultural orientation makes them less willing to share their ideas and thoughts with an instructor who they deem as higher in status. The finding that students’ cultural orientation relates to preference for anonymity and positive student reactions to using clickers is an important one because today’s classrooms are increasingly composed of students from different cultures.

We were surprised to find that, contrary to our prediction, performance-prove orientation was not significantly negatively related to preference for anonymity in classroom participation. We had expected that students who tend to seek out opportunities to demonstrate their ability to others would react negatively to the anonymity provided by clickers because it would deprive them of the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to the instructor and other students in the classroom. Study participants’ open-ended comments provided some additional insights in this area. Students who did not prefer anonymity in responding to questions in class were mostly concerned with the rewards (e.g., personalized feedback from the instructor) associated with not being anonymous as opposed to demonstrating ability to others.

Understanding the types of students who prefer to respond anonymously, and who therefore are more likely to react positively to technologies such as clickers that afford anonymity, enables instructors to more effectively implement these types of instructional methods in their classes in a way that meets the needs of diverse class members. A fruitful area for future research related to the findings of this study is to examine the different options for implementing clickers available to instructors as well as the different types of classes in which clickers might be most beneficial.

Read “Preference for Anonymous Classroom Participation: Linking Student Characteristics and Reactions to Electronic Response Systems” online in the Journal of Management Education.

Teams In the Management Classroom: A Teaching Moment

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Management educators who use teams in the classroom often face challenges in holding team members accountable for their performance. In a new Journal of Management Education podcast, associate editor Cindi Fukami talks with Dr. H. Kristl Davison of the University of Mississippi about her article, “How Individual Performance Affects Variability of Peer Evaluations in Classroom Teams: A Distributive Justice Perspective,” co-authored by Vipanchi Mishra of Iona College and Mark N. Bing and Dwight D. Frink, both of the University of Mississippi. Forthcoming in JME, the paper is now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section.  Click here to play or download the podcast interview or subscribe on iTunes by following this link.

Dr. H. Kristl Davison is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Mississippi. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology from Tulane University. She has worked as an Employee Selection Specialist for GTE/Verizon, and has also consulted in the areas of compensation, employee surveys, and statistical analysis. Her research interests include organizational justice and ethics, employment discrimination, gender and diversity issues, counterproductive workplace behavior, applicant faking, and personnel selection. She has published her research in journals such as Journal of Management Education, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Organizational Research Methods, and Journal of Business and Psychology.

Dr. Cynthia V. Fukami is Professor in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver.  She is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Management Education, and serves on the editorial board for Academy of Management Learning and Education, among others.  She has served on the Academy of Management’s Teaching Committee, and was the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society (OB-1).  She co-edited Sage’s Handbook of Management Learning, Education and Development with Steven Armstrong.

Using Games as Learning Tools

Wendy L. Bedwell, Davin Pavlas, Kyle Heyne, Elizabeth H. Lazzara and Eduardo Salas, all of the University of Central Florida, published “Toward a Taxonomy Linking Game Attributes to Learning: An Empirical Study” in the Simulation & Gaming December 2012 issue. The abstract:

The serious games community is moving toward research focusing on direct comparisons between learning outcomes of serious games and those of more traditional training methods. Such comparisons are difficult, however, due to the lack of a consistent taxonomy of game attributes for serious games. Without a clear understanding of what truly constitutes a game, scientific inquiry will continue to reveal inconsistent findings, making it hard to provide practitioners with guidance as to the most important attribute(s) for desired training outcomes. This article presents a game attribute taxonomy derived from a comprehensive literature review and subsequent card sorts performed by subject matter experts (SMEs). The categories of serious game attributes that emerged represent the shared mental models of game SMEs and serve to provide a comprehensive collection of game attributes. In order to guide future serious games research, the existing literature base is organized around the framework of this taxonomy.

Click here to continue reading, and follow this link to learn more about Simulation & Gaming, a leading international forum for the exploration and development of simulation/gaming methodologies used in education, training, consultation, and research. You can receive e-alerts about new research from the journal by clicking here.

Design Thinking: Reinvigorating Management Education

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The concept of “design thinking” has been around for a while–you may have read about it in Harvard Magazine or heard about it on 60 Minutes in just the past few weeks–and it’s now making a breakthrough among management educators and students. On the latest Journal of Management Education podcast, Ann Welsh of the University of Cincinnati joins Kathy Lund Dean to discuss her paper “Combining Critical Reflection and DesignThinking to Develop Integrative Learners,” co-authored by Gordon Dehler of the College of Charleston and now available in JME’s OnlineFirst section. Listen in as Dr. Welsh explains the benefits of engaging students with “messy” learning experiences, the transformative effect of design thinking, and something called the “fried-egg metaphor.” Click here to play or download the podcast interview or subscribe on iTunes by following this link.

Professor Ann Welsh (Ph.D., University of Missouri) has maintained her passion for helping students to find their pathway to a productive and satisfying life and for helping organizations to innovate in anticipation of changing environmental conditions. Her scholarship appears in the most influential journals in business such as the Academy of Management Journal and the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Learning and the Journal of Management Education.  Her current research focuses on the use of design thinking to enhance management education, developing new pedagogical approaches for multidisciplinary critical management education.

Gordon E. Dehler (PhD U of Cincinnati) is in the department of management & entrepreneurship in the School Business at the College of Charleston.  He joined C of C in 2005 following positions at George Washington University and the University of Dayton teaching in graduate and undergraduate management programs.  Gordon is the recipient of the OBTS Teaching Society for Management Educators’ 2013 David Bradford Outstanding Educator Award and received the C of C School of Business Distinguished Teaching Award in 2009.  He is the only associate editor to have served both Management Learning and Journal of Management Education, received JME’s 2007 Roethlisberger Award for his piece on action research, and served as site coordinator for the 2009 OBTC at C of C.

Kathy Lund Dean holds the Board of Trustees Distinguished Chair in Leadership and Ethics at Gustavus Adolphus College She earned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior and ethics from Saint Louis University. For fifteen years she has been active in both the OBTS Teaching Society for Management Educators, where she served on the Board, and the Academy of Management. Currently, she’s researching ethics and decision-making among entry-to-mid-level managers, how religious and spiritual disputes in the workplace get resolved, and student disengagement issues.

#MBA Week: Preparing for the Real World

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It’s #MBA Week on the Financial Times, which has released its global MBA rankings, and we are pleased to bring you articles from SAGE Journals that highlight practical advice and real-world skill building for MBA students and faculty.

From Psychological Science, don’t miss “Daily Horizons: Evidence of Narrow Bracketing in Judgment from 10 Years of M.B.A. Admissions Interviews,” published by Uri Simonsohn of The Wharton School,at the University of Pennsylvania and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, and highlighted in Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat:

MBA applicants may be at a disadvantage if they interview on a day when several others have already received positive evaluations, say Uri Simonsohn of The Wharton School and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School. In a study of more than 9,000 MBA interviews, the researchers found that for any of several possible reasons, including people’s tendency to underestimate the presence of “streaks” in random sequences, interviewers who have given high scores to a number of candidates in a given day seem reluctant to give a similarly high score to a subsequent candidate.

Click here to read on, and don’t miss these recent articles on skill-building for MBA students:

“The MBA Capstone Course: Building Theoretical, Practical, Applied, and Reflective Skills,” published by Syeda Noorein Inamdar and Malu Roldan, both of San Jose State University, in the Journal of Management Education on January 30, 2013:

The capstone strategy course is used in many management education programs to provide practical business relevance as a means for students to transition to the business world. We conducted an empirical study to determine to what extent capstone strategy courses are teaching the following four skills that prepare students to meet business job demands: theoretical, practical, applied, and reflective.

“Developing Global Business Capabilities in MBA Students,” published by W. Alan Randolph, University of Baltimore in the Journal of Management Inquiry September 2011 issue:

The need to develop global business capabilities in MBAs is clear and growing, and faculty must create efficient and effective processes for developing these capabilities.The author offers for consideration an approach that utilizes theory combined with practice to begin developing global business capabilities during a one-semester course.

Faculty and students will also find a wealth of information in the Journal of Management Education podcast, featuring interviews with management educators who seek to reflect on their professional practice and to engage readers in an exploration of what or how to teach in order for students to learn and practice effective management.

A Passion for Work: Part 5 of 5

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Part Five: Creating Passionate Hearts

The search for work passion starts with educating our future business leaders to love what they do. Today we conclude our series on work passion with a piece from the Journal of Management Education. Fahri Karakas of Norwich Business School published “Positive Management Education: Creating Creative Minds, Passionate Hearts, and Kindred Spirits” in the April 2011 issue of JME. The abstract:

The goal of this article is to explore positive management education, a practice-based teaching and learning model centered on positive organizational scholarship. Six signs of transformation in organizations are presented: complexity, community, creativity, spirituality, flexibility, and positivity. A model for positive management education is introduced, based on six related dimensions: fostering integrative and holistic thinking, building a sense of community through high-quality relationships, developing creative brainstorming and skill building through innovative projects, integrating spirituality into the classroom, fostering flexibility and empowerment, and designing positive enabling, nurturing learning platforms. This positive management education model is illustrated through selected best practices from a pilot study of an experiential organizational behavior course.

Read the article in the Journal of Management Education. JME welcomes contributions from all management educators who seek to reflect on their professional practice and to engage readers in an exploration of what or how to teach in order for students to learn and practice effective management. Click here to receive e-alerts about the latest research from the journal.

Does Cramming For Finals Work?

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Are you or your students cramming for finals this week? Find out how effective it is in the short run, in the long run, and in terms of overall GPA in this article from the Journal of Marketing Education:

Cramming for finals is common on college campuses, and many students seem to cram for their final in the Principles of Marketing course. This article addresses the question of defining and measuring a “cramming study strategy.” Scales are developed to assess (a) cramming for courses in general and (b) cramming specifically in the Principles of Marketing course relative to two other study strategies. Several research questions about cramming are addressed, including (a) How widespread is the practice? (b) How effective do students perceive it to be? (c) How effective is it actually, both in the short and long term, for students’ GPA and grade in the Principles of Marketing course? and (d) Is there a deterioration in retention, as measured by a master test, of content learned in the Principles course from using more of a cramming study strategy? Implications are discussed, particularly in light of various pedagogical approaches to combating learning decay, and areas for future research are suggested.

Read the article, “Exploring Cramming: Student Behaviors, Beliefs, and Learning Retention in the Principles of Marketing Course,” published by Shelby H. McIntyre and J. Michael Munson, both of Santa Clara University, California, in the Journal of Marketing Education. If you’d like to be notified about new research on the latest techniques in marketing education, click here to sign up for e-alerts from the journal.