When Marketing Education Review was founded, there was really only one competitor, JME, and the field was not particularly advanced. Buddy LaForge rightfully believed that the scholarship of teaching was growing in importance and needed an outlet reflective of its place in our field. Thus, he began MER and soon after, recruited me and several others to serve as section editors who could join him in promoting the scholarship of teaching and help fledge the journal. Here we are some 25 years later, with a strong journal and a competitive field of three good journals. Now, we are in a state of transition.
With this issue, I have received the helm from Brian Vander Schee. Brian did a remarkable job in his term, and not just with shepherding the transition from ME Sharpe to Taylor and Francis as publisher and the implementation of the ScholarOne manuscript management system. The journal thrived under his leadership, building momentum as we began the transition to rigorous scholarship of teaching. My hope is to continue the strong legacy that began with Buddy and continued most recently with Brian, a legacy that makes this journal the premier place to find science applied to the challenges of marketing education.
Brian, as editor, knew from my reviews that I am vigilant for rigor. Our field has matured to the point where we are able to conduct field trials that answer questions with real science. I realize, though, that there is still a need to provide guidance and support for this type of work. As editor, I will continue the trend Brian began in this area.
One area where we need good work is methods. If we are to continue to increase the rigor of the scholarship of education, we need to work on our methods. Simple pre/post-tests of change in student perceptions may no longer be sufficient as they really don’t prove our theorems. By developing appropriate methods, we can strengthen the field.
In this issue, the real editing work was done by Brian. While there are still articles to come that he shepherded through the process, I think you’ll agree that this issue has his fingerprints all over it - high quality work that you'll want to share with others in your department or across your college.
Earl Honeycutt and Shawn Thelen are right in line with what I hope will be a continuing trend – research on graduate education. This piece examines what graduates look for in academic positions. Copy this and give it to your dean. I won’t spoil their thunder but I can tell you that I’m taking a little different approach with how we recruit new faculty at ODU!
Mary Foster, Bettina West, and Barbara Bell-Angus provide an example of another trend I hope will continue – using theory to understand teaching. I was recently presenting a workshop on active learning to our faculty and one of the accountants asked what neuroscience had to offer and how that science should affect teaching. Foster, West, and Bell-Angus use neuroscience to explain flipped classroom learning. As someone who has kicked an entire class out for not coming to class prepared so we could practice what was in the chapter, I’ve long been a proponent of the flipped classroom. This paper is not just theory, it is truly theory-in-use, which is what we need – both in the journal and in the classroom!
Don Bacon, Carol Johnson, and Kim Stewart take on student evaluations and the problem of non-response bias. To be candid, if I wasn’t writing this editorial, I would be writing annual faculty evaluations and worrying about non-response bias. Non-response bias is the dirty secret of student evaluations (and frankly, the dirty secret of a lot of research). I bet we can all think of one or two of our classes where we hoped a certain 20% wouldn’t respond. There is so much more work to be done here but Bacon, Johnson, and Stewart offer an empirically-sound theoretical perspective to get the work going.
Laura Munoz, Richard Miller and Sonja Martin Poole offer another theoretically-sound view of an educational issue; in this case, it is the issue of student engagement in professional organizations. I’ve taught long enough to believe that sometimes, professional organization engagement is something you have to force – at least early in a student’s college career. But as experiential learning becomes more important, engagement in career organizations is important to soft skill development and career awareness. This piece examines theoretical foundations for participating, identifying segments and offering strategies for improving student engagement.
The Teaching Moments piece, edited by Joel Whalen and Kesha Coker, is personally special to me and I hope it becomes a tradition of the journal. This piece is derived from the highly popular Teaching Moments track at SMA that Joel Whalen and I started a few years back at SMA. What you’ll find here is a brief teaser on an idea that you can use in class to convey a simple point, a reason to think differently about your exams, or something else about teaching that was conveyed in five minutes or less at last fall’s conference. Those ideas that you’d like to learn more about and perhaps try for yourself are then presented in full on the MER website. If you haven’t attended one of these high-energy sessions led by Joel Whalen and Kesha Coker, you are missing a real treat!
I’d like to thank Brian and the board for placing their trust in me. I know that the journal is a collective effort, and I truly appreciate the work of the editorial board and ad hoc reviewers. With your help, we can continue to develop this journal and the field of marketing education scholarship.
John F. (Jeff) Tanner
Editor
Old Dominion University