Abstract
This August 2018 issue of the Journal of Marketing Education (JME) offers an eclectic collection of articles that advance important and popular areas of marketing education research. As such, this issue provides an impression of the variety of research and growing maturity in our discipline. We launch this issue with Dahl, Peltier, and Schibrowsky’s article on critical thinking, and then move to Harding’s piece on assigning students to groups, Inks and Avila’s article on factors influencing students to pursue sales careers, and Burnham and Makienko’s contribution that explores factors that affect student performance on exams.
Critical thinking is a topic that has perplexed marketing educators for decades. Marketing employers value meta-skills (Finch, Nadeau, & O’Reilly, 2013), and higher-level thinking skills may be more valuable to employers than marketing content itself (Bacon, 2017). But what exactly is critical thinking and how do we enhance critical thinking in marketing education? Dahl, Peltier, and Schibrowsky conduct an exhaustive search of the primary marketing education journals and one top management education journal to provide a much-needed review and synthesis of the critical thinking and reflective learning literature. They begin by providing useful definitions of this construct and they then examine the findings of the research in this area to shed the most valid light to date on the state of our knowledge. It is interesting that of the 109 articles they identified, more than two thirds were conceptual articles. Only 29 articles used quantitative measures, and only 12 of those articles used any direct measures of learning. Only a few of the 12 articles used direct measures of critical thinking. I believe that some of the most important outcomes in marketing education are the most difficult to measure, and critical thinking is chief among them. Dahl et al. have laid a solid foundation for future research, identified the limits of our current knowledge, and hopefully they will inspire others to take on the challenges presented in this important area.
As much as has been written about the management of student team projects, much remains to be learned. The most cited articles in this area generally provide a solid review of the literature and/or an innovative methodology. In this issue, Harding’s article provides both. For those new to the literature, she addresses social loafing, free riding, retributive loafing, the sucker effect, contribution blocking, peer evaluations, methods of assigning students to teams, and several other concepts that are fundamental to understanding student groups. Harding then conducts tests to see if students who are assigned to groups using a flocking method perform better and learn more than students who self-select their own groups. In flocking, students are grouped based on the similarity of both their schedules and how much time they plan to commit to the group project. Positive findings are reported for both group performance and individual learning, suggesting that the less motivated students become more motivated when they work with students they have more in common with. Beyond its topic and research results, this article is also impressive for its use of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to understand the effects of individual and group level variables. The use of this analytical tool represents an important step forward in understanding student teams. I look forward to implementing flocking in team assignments in my classes to see if Harding’s findings are replicated.
Regular readers of JME may have noticed an increase in the number of articles about sales education. Our special issue on sales education and training, published in August 2014, was so well-received that a second special issue on this topic, titled “Sales Education and Training 2.0” is in the works (see the Call for Papers in this issue). A frequently examined topic in this area is students’ motivation to enter sales careers. A sign of the growing maturity of this research stream is the development of the Intent to Pursue Sales Career (ITPSC) scale, first published in this journal, that captures a student’s interest in a sales career (Peltier, Cummins, Pomirleanu, Cross, & Simon, 2014). In this issue, Inks and Avila contribute to our understanding of what motivates students to study sales or enter a sales career by collecting ITPSC data among high school students and asking questions about their selection of college majors. Three out of the four factors studied—perceptions of the sales profession, sales knowledge, and perceptions of salespeople—were strongly related to interest in a sales career, while a fourth factor, sales ethics, was not related. Interestingly, male high school students were substantially more interested in a sales career than female high school students. I found the article interesting because it shows that even at this young age, professional stereotypes and gender stereotypes may exist that inhibit students’ choice of careers. The formation of potential biases and the methods for correcting these biases represent important areas for continued research in sales education.
Testing is an integral part of most marketing educators’ lives, and so this topic has a long history in our literature (for a classic example, see McIntyre & Munson, 1986). One question that my students and I have wondered about is whether students who generally finish an exam last are among the academically weakest students. In a 2003 study in JME, I found evidence that slow multiple-choice test takers did have lower scores, but I did not explore any covariates that might explain this relationship. Burnham and Makienko present a much more comprehensive study of this issue. They explore four interesting forms of academic motivation (performance approach, mastery approach, performance avoidance, and mastery avoidance) and several other variables including hours of outside employment per week. Interestingly, slow finishers do tend to achieve lower scores, but that may only be due to other factors such as test anxiety, English language skills, and test taking strategy. The results suggest that students should not worry about how long they take on exams, but they should be wary of working too many hours per week. This is an article we may want to pass along to our students!
In this issue, we see contributions at the leading edge of critical thinking, student teams, sales education, and testing. I hope that these articles inform current practice and inspire further research in each area. Until December, thank you for supporting JME.