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.     

A different type of charter school: in prestige charters,a rise in cachet equals a decline in access

This paper seeks to elucidate a specific type of charter school. While much has been written about school choice and the expanding charter school segment, a growing and important number of charter schools do not fit in to the common understanding of these schools. Distinct from many of their counterparts, prestige charter schools have the following two features: elements which foster a reputation similar to that of elite private schools and a student population demographically distinct from local public district schools – whereby the prestige charters serve a disproportionate number of advantaged families. The prestige elements include: founding by advantaged community members; parental involvement; wait lists; popularity with advantaged professionals; high test scores; and niche themes. The authors will show through two in-depth case studies that prestige charter schools work hand-in-hand with gentrification in urban neighborhoods, and result in racial and class segregation and inequality. This paper examines how these charter schools struggle when a rise in prestige coincides with a decline in access for low-income students. The authors recommend that given the current system of school choice, prestige charter schools must use tools and mechanisms to maintain demographic diversity and educational equity which is in the best interest of all children.     

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.     

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.