Abstract
In this December 2016 issue of the Journal of Marketing Education (JME), you will find interesting and quite useful ideas for improving marketing education, including methods to increase student learning and student satisfaction with the classroom experience and new insights into sales education. Mark Young, past recipient of both the JME Reviewer of the Year award and the Outstanding Paper of the Year award (Young, 2005), authored this issue’s lead article. In his most recent contribution, Young demonstrates a classroom technique that leads to substantial improvements in actual student learning. In our next article, Veeck, O’Reilly, MacMillan, and Yu implement a thoughtful twist on the practice on implementing midcourse student evaluations. In making the midcourse evaluations collaborative and online, they present a new way to understand students’ perspectives of assessing instructor performance. Two articles focus on sales education. Beuk examines sales simulations from both a student point of view and a faculty perspective to identify challenges and opportunities for additional research. Mani, Kothandaraman, Kashyap, and Ashnai drill down into the predictors of student performance in sales role-plays, and in so doing, they shed new light on predictors of future job performance in sales careers. Once again, I am indebted to the Editorial Review Board and many ad hoc reviewers for their time and effort in helping to shape these articles. Their contributions are the foundation of the continued success of the JME.
As more educators experiment with flipping the classroom, a recognized challenge is ensuring that students are ready for the day’s in-class learning experience. In this regard, one popular technique is to test students before class or at the beginning of class; however, this approach to readiness assurance testing may not encourage deep learning. In the lead article, Young describes his Connected Notes intervention that both prepares students for class and facilitates more complex learning. The Connected Notes technique integrates note-taking concepts from three different note-taking methods. In so doing, the technique encourages students to think deeply about the material and form personally relevant connections. Young presents a compelling test of this new intervention, and he finds effect sizes for gains in actual learning (see Bacon, 2016) that are some of the largest effect sizes that have been published in JME. Although the technique requires additional effort by students, arguably students saw the benefit of their work because course evaluations were not negatively affected. Instructors looking for ways to improve actual student learning should take a close look at this article.
While Young’s study provides a new approach to improve student learning, our next article presents an approach that can improve the student classroom experience as captured in student evaluations of teaching (SET). Most student evaluations of teaching data are collected at the end of the academic term; however, collecting data in the middle of the term can provide teachers with formative feedback for making midcourse corrections. Veeck, O’Reilly, MacMillan, and Yu present a new approach for implementing midterm evaluations—having students work in groups, synchronously and online, to provide qualitative midterm feedback. The authors found that one advantage to collaborative evaluation is that students can comment on other students’ feedback, which enables the instructor to more clearly distinguish between isolated idiosyncratic reactions and patterns that many students experience. One insightful aspect of this article is the authors’ description of an earlier version of their technique that did not work quite so well. The description helps us see how and why they made the choices that led to their final design so that we can avoid making those mistakes ourselves. Overall, this article provides a quite useful tool for improving student evaluations of teaching.
Simulations have a long history in marketing education, and they continue to be a topic of interest in our field. Our recent special issue on simulations in marketing (August, 2016) had several outstanding articles and has been well received by our readers. In this issue, Beuk explains that sales simulations are somewhat underresearched, and he provides an excellent background on sales simulations and insights into current usage. Beuk explores similarities and differences in attitudes toward sales simulations using data from large student and sales instructor samples. Several findings are quite interesting. For example, some ambiguity remains about the relative effectiveness of simulations, case discussions, and lectures as aids in student learning. Beuk also finds that the key to a simulation’s adoption may be its suitability for the learning goals of the course. I think these two findings could be linked to produce a much needed result. If simulations were more closely connected to the learning goals of sales courses, and studies were conducted of actual student learning using these simulations, the use of sales simulations would be greatly enhanced. Beuk has done an excellent job in highlighting the challenges in this area—now we are ready for more research on solutions.
Marketing educators have long been concerned with identifying and emphasizing the aspects of marketing education that most contribute to student success in getting a job (see, e.g., Bolander, Bonney, & Satornino, 2014; Finch, Nadeau, & O’Reilly, 2013; Schlee & Harich, 2010). Mani, Kothandaraman, Kashyap, and Ashnai analyze aspects that are potentially related to success in sales role-plays, which are often used in sales job interviews. Interestingly, they find support for a classic model of job performance where role-play performance is predicted by the participant’s ability and motivation. Thus, while ability measured by GPA predicts sales role-play performance, motivation also plays an important role. To our knowledge, this article is the first published study that empirically examines these relationships in marketing. Mani and colleagues used data from a large sales role-play competition. They note that role-plays are increasingly popular in sales education and there are now many intracollegiate and intercollegiate competitions. Hopefully, this study and its thoughtful methodology will motivate additional research in sales education.
From student learning, course design, and student satisfaction with the classroom experience, to preparing students for career success, this issue’s contributors provide insights and ideas that are useful to readers. I hope that they will inspire further research in each area. Until April, thank you for supporting JME.