Adjustments in businss education for enhanced analogical transfert

Abstract

In business administration many principles exist. With such principles managers often got in touch within the scope of their former education. Later, in their real business lives, they try to apply these learned principles to current problems and, thereby, reason by analogy. However, managers often fail to remember or correctly apply the principles they once learned or experienced. This can lead to wrong decisions and result in fatal company developments. Therefore, the improvement of correct retrievals of principles in adequate situations is an important issue. In order to increase the performance of the application of correct analogies, based on theoretical findings, an experiment was conducted. Within this experiment, first, the author applied an existing model of receiving better retrievals to circumstances as they are prevailing in business education. Analogical encoding is about the comparison of situations, which has already shown successful schema abstraction and retrieval in a series of experiments in literature. However, these results are based on the comparison of cases that strongly vary from the cases as they are used in real business education. Due to the fact, that this approach requires two analogous examples and, consequently, its use in the context of long and demanding business cases is very challenging, secondly, the author evaluated another technique that is easier to adapt in an educational context. This approach is about the variation of a situation and has also been successfully tested in literature for improved analogical transfer performances. However, it has not been applied and evaluated in the context of the case study teaching approach yet. The author developed a question technique based on variation that allows students to thoroughly abstract principles from the case. Working with this approach, only one case is needed. The success of both approaches was evaluated in the experiment. Moreover, the performance of a group dealing with the currently practiced case training in class having no specific elements included for analogical purposes was tested. Additionally, a group that has had no prior training had to solve the transfer case in order to evaluate, to what extent the solution rate was based on prior training success. In result, the retrieval performances of students that were trained with the comparison or variation approach were significantly better than those of students of the other experimental groups. In particular, due to its better practicability in classes, the variation-approach seems promising for further research in business education teaching with case studies. Summarized, the thesis contributes to an improvement of the analogical retrieval and application of formerly learned principles in later situations in real-business life.