Lisa A. Burke-Smalley

Using Oral Exams to Assess Communication Skills in Business Courses.

Business, like many other fields in higher education, continues to rely largely on conventional testing methods for assessing student learning. In the current article, another evaluation approach—the oral exam—is examined as a means for building and evaluating the professional communication and oral dialogue skills needed and utilized by business graduates. Prior studies of oral exams in higher education are reviewed, along with the empirical findings from an exploratory investigation of an oral exam in an undergraduate human resource course. Implications for future research and the use of oral exams in business education are also presented.

Mission-Centric Learning: Developing Students’ Workplace Readiness Skills

We discuss and evaluate the implementation of a mission-centric course project that is strategically tied to learning outcomes important to colleges of business. Specifically, to support our college’s mission, undergraduate students enrolled in a training and development class were tasked with applying course concepts to assess the need for, to design, and to deliver (to other business students) workplace readiness training. To aid other management educators interested in adopting similar strategically aligned and feedback-rich learning experiences, we outline and discuss relevant project planning, design, and facilitation issues, as well as present a summary of initial results derived from this project.

Demography and student success: Early warning tools to drive intervention

Abstract Grounded in the concept of organizational demography, the authors investigate various demographic, precollege, and socioeconomic student-level attributes that universities readily house, and use them to create customized early warning tools to advance students’ academic success. Upon a review of prior studies of sociodemographic influences in higher education, the authors examine two facets of academic success—student performance and retention—and create a decision support model for each. Such data-driven early warning tools are immediately useful in undergraduate business education and can help university staff, administrators, and faculty make customized decisions regarding data-driven support strategies for improving key student outcomes.

Creating a Culture of Engagement in Business Schools

ABSTRACT Business schools, in the face of various external pressures, are confronted with the daunting challenge of better engaging their constituents to achieve their learning mission. We call for engagement to play a unifying role in a business school’s culture. We incorporate relevant learning, marketing and change management concepts to first present conceptual tenets underlying our engagement model including co-creation of learning and students as works-in-progress. We then propose a plan for creating a culture of engagement in business schools to advance their learning mission, which broadly involves students, faculty, alumni, employers and administrators. The tactical plan is presented in four steps: assessment, redesign, implementation and evaluation of an engagement culture.

Practice to Research: Rapport as Key to Creating an Effective Learning Environment

Rapport is an instructional variable that is “tricky to understand,” which is perhaps the reason why it is understudied in the extant literature. Certainly, essays, tip lists, and effective teaching mantras often claim rapport as vital to the instructional context, but that is typically the extent of most examinations, particularly in management education. In this practice-to-research article, my experiences are integrated with the limited published evidence surrounding rapport, and research propositions are offered to inform future business education studies.

An empirical investigation of the financial value of a college degree

ABSTRACT We generate selection-adjusted NPV and IRR estimates for a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. which account for time-to-graduation, debt financing and tuition levels. We find that a college degree is generally worthwhile, but the private value of the investment is a declining function of time-to-graduation. Selection-adjustments show that for students at the lower end of the ability distribution and in some areas of study, a college degree may never be a good financial proposition; as such, we provide breakeven thresholds for tuition at which college remains viable. Debt financing generates higher returns but greater risk compared to self-financing.