Abstract
This is the initial report of a multi-university study of students participating in business simulations. The study’s purpose is an attempt to determine what skills students learn while taking part in business gaming. This study defined a set of 16 primary learning skills that had been previously suggested by a variety of authors. University students were surveyed immediately upon completion of a business simulation that was included in their coursework. The results presented here are limited to US students enrolled in US universities. Future analysis will explore whether the data suggests international students learn the skills differently than US nationals. This study found that debriefing had a substantial and measurable impact on the student’s learning; however, debriefing alone was not the primary variable in learning. It was important only after the student considered the debriefing to be important and their instructor had the ability to facilitate the debriefing.
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The authors gratefully acknowledge the professors and universities listed in Table 6 for their assistance in forwarding the electronic surveys to their students.
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Teach, R., Szot, J. (2019). What Business Simulations Teach: The Effect of Debriefing. In: Hamada, R., et al. Neo-Simulation and Gaming Toward Active Learning. Translational Systems Sciences, vol 18. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8039-6_49
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