WPER Presentation

1. Summary of Personal Action Research Applying Critical Thinking Business Simulation Scenarios to French Business School Undergraduates Mr. Niall Douglas BSc MA MBS MCollT WPER Presentation

2. Breakdown of this presentation • Quick introduction to traditional Business School teaching (5 slides) • Springer and Borthick’s SNO experimental curriculum (3 slides) • My French undergraduate class (2 slides) • How the SNO curriculum was applied to my class (2 slides) • My Results (6 slides) • Future Research (1 slide)

3. Quick Introduction To Traditional Business School Teaching (1/5) • Business Schools (even the top ones like Harvard) teach a very theory heavy course • Lots and lots and LOTS of case studies like Law • As with most social sciences, theory is dichotomised between qualitative and quantitative with a traditional split of 70/30 • Qualitative theory is split cleanly between “classical” and “poststructural” • Quantitative theory typically consists of basic standalone courses in Accounting, Economics, Finance and Statistics (the students typically hate these!)

4. Quick Introduction To Traditional Business School Teaching (2/5) • Practice is fairly light in most courses • Some of the better courses will engage in a lot of small task orientated group projects, typically involving the generation and delivery of a presentation. Many don’t even bother with this! • Some elite courses may even scale this up to quite a large final group project typically proposing a business venture for a business incubator (e.g. A business plan, a VC pitch etc) • Stanford in particular is famous for this (think Google et al) • Note the total lack of real world every day typical business practice!

5. Quick Introduction To Traditional Business School Teaching (3/5) • So bad in fact are typical fresh Business School graduates that: • They cannot calculate past profitability from real world sales figuresestimates • They cannot estimate future profitability – at all • They have no concept of taxation or regulation influencing business strategy as it isn’t taught – at all – at Business Schools • Worst of all, they don’t even know where to start without being substantially spoon fed • Put simply, most fresh graduates are not even remotely “fit for purpose”. Despite the tens of thousands of euro sunk into their tuition, they are highly skills deficient

6. Quick Introduction To Traditional Business School Teaching (4/5) • What do employers say about fresh Business School graduates? • About 20% of fresh graduates are seen as “unhireable” because they are so bad • About 75% of what remains are seen as needing very substantial further (re)training (i.e. Expensive) • Even about 10% regularly submit job applications that are incoherent. The question becomes, how did they possibly pass their degree? • What employers say is lacking in fresh graduates: • Students are generally good at basic knowledge skills (reading, writing, maths), generally terrible at “applied skills”

7. Quick Introduction To Traditional Business School Teaching (5/5) • What are “applied skills”? • Critical Thinking • (which is generally deficient in all graduates) • Problem Solving • (i.e. Creating own solutions through research instead of being spoon fed) • Teamworking • Work ethic and effective work habits • (typically student half arse something because they get bored and don’t finish it) • Workload management • (typically students leave everything to the last minute – fine for cramming exams, bad in real life) • And the old classic ... common sense!

8. Springer and Borthick’s SNO Experimental Curriculum (1/3) • All this is very well known since the 1960s – however, change is glacially slow • Thus in the early 2000s enters a young enthusiastic Instructor, Carol Springer at Georgia State University • She comes up with a “Business Simulation” idea where students must wrestle with real life Business problems • Especially the fact that in Business there are no right answers, and reliable information is VERY rare – most of doing Business is guesswork!

9. Springer and Borthick’s SNO Experimental Curriculum (2/3) • Quoting Springer, C. W., and A. F. Borthick. 2004. ‘Business simulation to stage critical thinking in introductory accounting: Rationale, design and implementation’. Issues in Accounting Education 19(3): 277-303: • “The needed capability ... [is] to solve problems that cannot be described with a high degree of completeness, cannot be resolved with a high degree of certainty, or elicit disagreement from experts about the best solution”

10. Springer and Borthick’s SNO Experimental Curriculum (3/3) • A three year follow up study finds substantial sustained performance improvement in the students which took this experimental curriculum as compared to a control group1 • And Ms. Springer (today Mrs. Springer Sargent) wins multiple accolades for innovation in Business teaching and gets rapidly promoted (up to just recently Assistant Professor) [1]: Springer, C. W., and A. F. Borthick. 2007. ‘Improving Performance in Accounting: Evidence for Insisting on Cognitive Conflict Tasks’. Issues in Accounting Education 22(1): 1-19

11. My French undergraduates (1/2) • In January 2011 I managed to obtain my first teaching work since 2009 (and I am extremely lucky to do so given the massive HE budget cuts and public sector hiring freeze) • They were a group of seventeen French Business School undergraduates from IDRAC Lyon, a reasonably prestigious French Business School • Typical age: 20 years, mostly in their second year, though some were a few years older. Eight were female, nine were male. • They were primarily here for one semester to improve their English, particularly to improve their TOEIC scores from the 350-400 range most of them were in (750 or over is required by most corporate or state employers). However I figured I could have some fun with them ... 

12. My French undergraduates (2/2) • At the end of week two I had noticed that they had poor problem solving abilities, even at an elementary level • In my typical action research performed during teaching, I researched what I might do about this finding Springer and Borthick (2004) in the literature • So I emailed Carol Springer Sargentand asked her for the full SNO syllabus • She very kindly agreed, so I set about converting them from a US cultural format into a French cultural format to make them less alien to the students • I made absolutely sure however to keep the numbers and format identical so the results would remain absolutely commensurate with those collected by Springer in the US

13. How the SNO Curriculum Was Applied To My Class (1/2) • Each SNO task was configured as follows: • Two pages of A4 detail the business problem along with various bits of deliberately vague and incomplete information • The students are broken into groups of four. The selection of group members was done in participation with the class to ensure balance and fairness between the groups • The students must prepare for each task (i) a live spreadsheet model of the problem (ii) a report in English giving advice based on various iterations of this spreadsheet model and (iii) a ten minute group presentation in English to the class summarising the report • Carol Springer Sargent’smarking and assessment rubric was used unchanged

14. How the SNO Curriculum Was Applied To My Class (2/2) • I then served up the first four of the SNO exercises over a THREE week period • This differs significantly from Springer’s test cohort who took eight exercises over one entire semester (typically sixteen weeks in the US) • A second difference was that the SNO curriculum was designed for Accounting students. Mine are Business students who likely have only done a very basic introductory Accounting course • A third difference is that the SNO curriculum was intended to be delivered in parallel with lectures on the necessary theory • My students performed the tasks with NO theory being taught at all. They performed the tasks entirely “blind” based on whatever they already knew from IDRAC and their own common sense • And lastly, my students were doing all this in a non-native language, at which some of them were quite poor indeed ... I figured this was an excellent way of improving them 

15. Results for SNO1 to SNO4

16. Results – Group 1 • Group 1 (three girls, one boy) found the maths content of the SNO tasks particularly intimidating, and particularly struggled with the increasing use of spreadsheets as the SNO tasks became more realistic over time • SNO3 was not helped by two of the girls being very sick that weekend either • Group 1 had the most negative perception of the SNO tasks by the end. As one of the students said, she was very glad that the ordeal was finally over!

17. Results for SNO1 to SNO4

18. Results – Group 2 • Group 2 (four boys) had issues with the SNO exercises at the start • Indeed one complained about SNO1 and asked to do something different, saying that he disliked the SNO exercises because they didn't set definitive parameters so he had no idea if he was doing the "right" thing, and therefore they made him feel bad • However after plenty of encouragement that taking reasonable “guestimates” is okay, they certainly warmed to the tasks and their grades improved week by week as they found their self confidence • After SNO4 the same student said that he had found the SNO tasks very useful indeed, perhaps the most relevant and interesting thing to Business he had studied yet. What a turn around! • Group 2’s approach was very much characterised by indecision and incomplete thinking at the start, but by SNO4 they were definitely finding their wings with a very complete and thought through piece of advice and business strategy

19. Results for SNO1 to SNO4

20. Results – Group 3 • Group 3 (three girls, one boy) excelled in the SNOs from the start and if it weren’t for catching the same nasty bug from Group 1 I am sure they would have also excelled in SNO4. They simply found them easy • Group 3 was particularly lucky – all four are excellent “out of the box” analytical thinkers with one of the girls being particularly good at “going where angels fear to tread”. The boy was also a whiz at spreadsheets, which came in perfect every time • Group 3’s approach was invariably analytical giving advice based on rational extrapolations • This kind of approach is typical of executive board level strategic thinking – though students are trained to act at executive level, the vast majority of Business Students will never reach the top

21. Results for SNO1 to SNO4

22. Results – Group 4 • Group 4 (three girls, two boys) were slightly disadvantaged by the two boys never turning up nor pulling their fair share • However, the three girls adapted to their perceived weakness in maths and spreadsheets by adopting a “rule of thumb” approach in the advice presented • Specifically, for each SNO they highlighted what they understood and didn’t understand • For what they understood, they took a universal approach of reducing costs e.g. Negotiate prices downwards with suppliers • For what they didn’t understand, they took a defensive posture to try and reduce its risk to the business • It has to be said that this approach is a pretty good default for most scenarios and would be highly valuable in middle management

23. Results for SNO1 to SNO4

24. Overall Results • For three of the four groups they really got into the SNO exercises, and all reported them as a highly valuable and fun exercise • For one of the groups – whose members excelled at traditional academic tasks and got some of the best grades in my class – the SNO exercises were highly frustrating and emotionally upsetting • This was particularly because they could see the relevance of these business simulations to the real world, and these typically very high achieving students were very unaccustomed to receiving low grades • However as a corollary, some of my academically weakest students scored very highly in the SNO exercises and clearly preferred working on the SNO tasks to the exclusion of all other academic work

25. Future research • I hope to cross compare these results with Carol Springer Sargent’sresults in Georgia State and see if anything interesting turns up • May even knock them into an academic paper and fire them off to a journal THANKS FOR LISTENING!