AN EXPERIMENT IN ASSESSING THE THEORETICAL RECOGNITION AND APPLICATION LEARNING SKILLS OF STUDENT CASE WRITERS

For eight weeks of a sixteen week semester, students had been analyzing short prepared cases dealing with managerial incidents. They had weekly opportunities to sharpen their cognitive assimilation skills in studying and discussing various textbook concepts and propositions dealing with human behavior, interpersonal behavior, and group behavior. It appeared the weekly case analysis activities afforded opportunities to transfer these theoretical constructs to textbook type organizational and managerial situations. In each case they attempted to answer a critical question: What are the characteristics of effective managerial behavior depicted in the case situation? The experiment described below, in part, was meant to demonstrate to them that they already possessed assumptions, and even complex implicit models, of how effective managers should behave in various circumstances. Learning Skills Sought This experiment was an attempt to demonstrate the operation of theory-practice transference processes and meaning abstraction processes which occurs in learning situations. The experiment sought to demonstrate to MBA students that they were capable of applying the concepts, theories, and working propositions concerning effective managerial behavior to thei