The Role, Development, and Implementation of a Marketing Knowledge base as a Tool in the Enhancement and Assessment of Student Learning

The Curriculum-Faculty-Reinforcement Alignment and Its Effect on Learning Retention of Core Marketing Concepts of Marketing Capstone Students

“…In this study, we refer to this repeated exposure as reinforcement. Although student learning objectives are often created using a collaborative process in which faculty members seek agreement on what concepts are most important for students to learn, the process is less likely to produce agreement on the emphasis to be placed on such concepts and in which classes they should be reinforced (Evans 2010;LaFleur, Babin, and Lopez 2009). It is thus reasonable to presume that the level of reinforcement might vary across the concepts deemed integral to a program's curriculum.…”

“…The topic of long-term knowledge retention has gained currency of late in marketing education as a means for understanding how learning outcomes can be improved (Bacon and Stewart 2006;Evans 2010;McIntyre and Munson 2008;Ramocki 2007). Given concerns regarding the ability of marketing students to bring sufficient knowledge to their capstone courses (Aistrich, Saghafi, and Sciglimpaglia 2006) and the acknowledgement that assessment drives learning (Boud and Falchikov 2006), assessing learning outcomes in marketing programs must include measurement of long-term retention.…”

“…Following procedures used in prior research (Evans 2010; LaFleur, Babin, and Lopez 2009), we first identified marketing concepts aligned with the marketing curriculum's student learning outcomes (SLOs). This list was compared to the table of contents of the required textbook for the Principles of Marketing course to determine a lexicon of marketing concepts integral to the marketing program.…”

“…The implementation of institutional processes to develop high quality student graduates with a body of applicable knowledge can be challenging (Evans 2010;LaFleur, Babin, and Lopez 2009;Nicholson, Barnett, and Dascher 2005). Business schools must manage this issue if they are to satisfy intensified accreditation requirements such as those of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (A ACSB) where they must now provide multiple data points as evidence of goal accomplishment, continuous improvement in their assurance of learning (AoL) standards, and curricula management (A ACSB International 2013).…”

“…This includes understanding exactly how much prerequisite knowledge senior students bring into their marketing capstone course from the core marketing courses that precede it. Previous studies suggest that repetitive exposures to concepts in curricula discipline programs help to facilitate greater learning retention and improvements in learning outcomes, especially when the exposures are spread over a longer period of time (Bacon and Stewart 2006;Berenson et al 2008;Evans 2010;Halpern and Hakel 2003). In this paper, we (1) advance the concept of Curriculum-Faculty-Reinforcement (CFR) alignment, defined as an alignment between marketing concepts that are integral to a program's curriculum (i.e., part of course learning objectives of core, required marketing courses), their perceived importance by the faculty, and their subsequent reinforcement through repeated concept exposure in the core marketing courses that students are required to take in order to earn a degree in a given marketing program; and (2) test the learning effect of such alignment on the longterm retention of core marketing concepts that marketing capstone students are expected to have mastered by graduation.…”