Increasing knowledge retention of business statistics through discipline-specific case studies

Abstract

The authors perform a classroom experiment to test the effectiveness of discipline-specific case studies on knowledge acquisition and retention in advanced business statistics courses. The results indicate that although students are more engaged in the case studies, overall there is no impact on acquisition or retention of statistics knowledge by having students engage in discipline-specific case studies relative to traditional case studies. However, for high-performing students, discipline-specific case studies have a positive and significant impact on statistical knowledge retention. Moreover, our research reaffirms past research, which has found greater retention for students with higher grade point average, and there exists a significant negative correlation between retention and time.

Keywords:

• Case studies
• knowledge acquisition
• knowledge retention
• pedagogy
• teaching method

Additional information

Funding

Funding from an Innovative Teaching Grant, Office of the Provost, Weber State University, provided money for incentives for faculty in specific disciplines to write case studies for this research (grant no. ITG-001).