Students’ Perceptions of Learning in an Online Multiround Business Simulation Game: What Can We Learn from Them?

Abstract

Multiround business simulation games have been gaining popularity in higher education. However, certain aspects of experiential learning of individual students in the game remain unaddressed in research literature. Team assessments, such as team papers, appear a common, “natural” choice given the team‐based nature of the games but may potentially mask individual learning outcomes. In this study we use a qualitative method to glean from individual students’ papers a deeper understanding of the process of learning of individual students in a team‐based, multiround business simulation game. Our findings indicate that individual and timely assessments are necessary to identify cases of not meeting the expected individual learning outcomes for the instructor's corrective intervention. This study contributes to the understanding of the process and outcomes of student learning in a multiround business simulation game, methods of teaching a supply chain and operations class with a simulation, and methods for better aligning course goals and assessments.

Heeding supply chain disruption warnings: When and how do cross‐functional teams ensure firm robustness?

“…TFC is used as an experiential learning tool in well‐known companies (e.g., Heineken, Adidas, Toyota, Coca‐Cola) and universities. Previous research shows its suitability for behavioral team research (e.g., Brazhkin & Zimmerman, 2019; Phadnis & Caplice, 2013) as “the decision data from the game provide a wealth of information about team behavior over time, which can be used for research on, for example, issues that relate behavior to performance criteria” (de Leeuw et al, 2015, p. 374).…”

A scoping review of approaches for measuring ‘interdependent’ collaborative performances

“…Numerous articles from certain fields (eg business and simulation) were excluded given their sole focus on group outcomes 19 (eg team performance, cohesiveness) or individual outcomes 20 (eg perceptions of learning). We also excluded work with no measurement aspect (eg curriculum descriptions), educational measurement not related to interdependence (eg differences between expert and novice performance), wholly conceptual work with no empirical data to illustrate a measurement application, work in languages other than English, and studies where the full manuscript was unavailable.…”

The omitted variable: could DuoTest enable a new way to assess the link between individual and team performance in team-based learning?

“…Team health from individual contributions (Team  Individual -or TI in short) Recent work from O'Neill et al [23] presents a set of 18 questions to rapidly and reliably assess the team health by asking team members to describe their perception of team communication, adaptability, relationships and education. Other scholars have suggested that assessment in TBL should take into account the cognitive, affective and behavioral dimensions [2]. Indeed, students have multiple goals and motivations, which influence the team performance: mastery goals ("I want to learn new things") and social responsibility goals ("I want help my peers") prevail in effective teams, whereas belongingness goals (e.g., "I want my peers to like me") were more important than mastery goals in ineffective teams [9].…”

“…Hence, this article starts with a simple intuition to bridge the two viewpoints: if we assume that the team itself is an important outcome of a team project, could we assess, at the end of the course, if the students would have been more/less effective without it? Indeed, there is a consensus on the difficulty of correctly assessing the performance of each student in a team project [2], and most educators lack a simple tool to do it. Nonetheless, most of the previous works have considered the team as noise to be cancelled to assess the individual, whereas we consider it as the most important artefact of a course, which asks students to work in teams to solve real-world projects and reflect on what they learned by doing so.…”