Impact of Personality on Academic Performance of MBA Students: Qualitative Versus Quantitative Courses*

The traditional core Masters in Business Administration (MBA) curriculum consists of a broad range of courses that can be considered as a whole, or divided into qualitative and quantitative courses. Regression models were developed with “QualGPA” and “QuantGPA” as response variables, and gender, pre‐MBA academic indicators, and personality factors (measured by the RightPath6^® profile) as the explanatory variables. Results may provide pedagogical insight for faculty teaching increasingly diverse MBA classes. Additionally, there are recruitment implications for those hiring MBA graduates, as well as implications for MBA students in decisions regarding MBA concentrations and subsequent career choices. While gender alone was not a significant variable in any model, gender–personality interactions were significant. Across both course categories, performance tended to be higher for students who were more “Detached” than “Compassionate,” with the exception of females in quantitative courses. Additionally, “Extraversion” and “Reactiveness” significantly enhanced performance among males in qualitative courses, and “Conscientiousness” had a strong positive performance effect among females in quantitative courses.     

A Behavioural Evaluation of Dance Instruction with Students Who Have Special Needs

A dance programme for a class of students with special needs was evaluated using a multiple baseline across behaviours design where the behaviours were movements representing aspects of the elements of dance: Space, Body Awareness, Relationships, Levels, Effort, Speed and Shape. Observational data showed that the instructional dance programme was successful in extending the variety of movements performed by the students and that the observational methodology designed for the study was a useful strategy for evaluating teaching in dance.     

Why states should enact an Adult Recurrent Education Entitlement Voucher program

This paper addresses the problems of financing adult continuing and recurrent postsecondary education in America. An analysis of the public investment and policy needs and recommendations for a specific state policy and program for meeting these needs are presented. It is adapted from the state-based Adult Recurrent Education Entitlement Voucher (AREEV) plan pending as legislation in Massachusetts. The AREEV design and the data on which it was originally based in Massachusetts are generalizable to other states. The rationale is not peculiar to Massachusetts.The AREEV proposal provides public investment in recurrent education in a manner that will enable existing educational resources to be utilized most efficiently by adults currently not being adequately served. The general context and rationale for public policy and investment is presented, and a specific, implementable design for legislation to create a state-based Adult Recurrent Education Entitlement Voucher program is recommended.This proposal is designed to aid selectively the working middle class, the disadvantaged, and the socially dependent to pursue part-time recurrent education to improve their career and social condition. The program places a priority first on subsidizing those adults who have the greatest need and then on subsidizing those activities that will yield the highest social rate of return, particularly in relation to problems of unemployment, social dependency, and the national skills base.Dr. Nolfi, an independent public policy analyst, is President of University Consultants, Inc., 45 Hancock Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. This paper is a chapter in the forthcoming bookRecurrent Education and Open Learning: Policy Analysis and Program Design at the State and National Level. The substance of the paper is drawn from several documents, and extended references for those sources are available from the author.     

Discovering the Laws of Sampling

That the sample mean and variance are “good” estimates of the corresponding population parameters is easily accepted as “obvious” by students, but the concept of standard error of the mean is often found to be quite a hurdle. That this standard error decreases inversely as the square-root of the sample size, and the mysterious appearance of the Normal distribution, are often taken as magical and incomprehensible effects, and non-mathematical students can often be turned away from further understanding. This article describes a program which provides an experimental framework in which the student can rapidly develop an intuition for the basic properties of sampling.     

UNIVERSITY‐BASED INITIATIVES IN FAVOUR OF ECOSYSTEM REHABILITATION FOR THE NORTH AMERICAN GREAT LAKES

On‐going attempts by governments to implement measures intended to eliminate environmental degradation in the nearshore waters of the Great Lakes have revealed a critical need for integrative understanding that transcends disciplinary and professional specialisms. Academics from universities in the United States and Canada began, ten years ago, to meet with government officials and with people from nongovernmental organizations to find solutions to the problems in question. Groups of academics followed up these meetings with policy oriented studies using systems and transdisciplinary perspectives. Results have been readily disseminated into a wider constituency of interests because of the participation of nonacademics in the guiding of the studies. Similar collaborative approaches have been used to design role playing exercises for students in environmental studies courses at universities, using various Great Lakes situations as examples. An action learning/research mode lies at the core of environmental education at university level which also has considerable potential for addressing other global issues at universities.     

Designing minimal computer manuals from scratch

We designed from scratch a minimal manual of the kind proposed by Carroll (1990) for Unix e-mail. The design process involved acquiring from a set of experts information about e-mail use that would be helpful to novices, and acquiring from novices information that guided subsequent versions of the manual. The seventh version of the minimal manual was tested against a commercial manual, in a comparative performance experiment, with 30 naive subjects. It had approximately 13% of the pages of the commercial manual; it resulted in 30% faster learning and more effective use of the e-mail system overall, and significantly better performance on individual subtasks; including the recovery from errors. Significantly more users were satisfied with it than with the conventional manual. Carroll's general principles of manual design for minimal manuals were found to be a good basis for design, and we suggest these guidelines are suitable for the design of such manuals from scratch.     

Does prior mathematics knowledge really lead to variation in elementary statistics performance? Evidence from a developing country

A model incorporating prerequisite mathematics performance and other variables deemed to be associated with learning elementary statistics (ES) is developed. The relationship between ES performance and the explanatory variables is well represented by the logistics form. Aptitude, effort and motivation are the only significant explanatory variables of ES performance. Since prerequisite mathematics is not significant, statistical thinking at the tertiary level may be mostly intuitive and non-mathematical. Students with low aptitude experience increasing returns to effort over the first half of the feasible effort interval, while high-aptitude students experience diminishing returns at all levels of effort. The levels of effort required to achieve a minimum pass are interpreted.