engleski

Assesing the experiment of raising student's critical thinking in Service Operations Management class

This paper presents an experiment conducted in Service Operations management class given in summer semester 2017. The purpose was rising understanding of the material while reducing by-heart learning. The experiment was created according to advices from McGuire S. Y. (2015), Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation, Stylus Publishing, LLC. Although prescriptions in the book are intended for STEM students, the prescriptions were modified to be applicable for Operations management course. Upon completing the course, an anonymous but compulsory survey was conducted to see how much the experiment was successful. Most of the questions in the survey questionnaire were taken from the Prashar (2015) work, which was created on the basis of an extensive analysis of learning and education and the so called „ flipped classroom“ phenomenon. The first part of the paper describes the previous research on pedagogy of teaching dominantly for Operational Management courses. Then the paper describes the professor's engagement in this kind of teaching, lectures in the lecture hall, but also the usage of learning platform. The description of the experiment includes exactly how much the professor spent time in the classroom lecture, and how much on the learning platform. Next, survey results are presented, completed by all 150 enrolled students. Preliminary results show significant oscillations in the amount of time students have invested in each activity for the same grade. However, form the teacher’s perspective the experiment is positive because preliminary analysis shows that average grades didn't significantly fall, yet the questions were much harder involving student's understanding and critical thinking. The survey shows when classical lectures are better and in which situations students are better taught using the platform. The results of this research and experiment are compared with similar experiments on Operational Management courses.

blended learning environment, flipped classroom, operations management, service operations management

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