Flipping the Marketing Research Classroom: Teaching with Team-Based Learning: An Abstract

Team-based learning (TBL) is “a specific sequence of activities and feedback designed to quickly change groups of individual students into high-performance learning teams in which participants know each other, need each other and hold each other accountable for preparation and contribution (Sweet and Michaelsen 2012, p. 18).” Theoretical support for TBL is provided in Sweet and Michaelsen (2007).

TBL is a four-step process. First, teams of five to seven students are strategically formed to work together throughout the semester to foster trust and communication. For example, in the marketing research classroom, the students completed a brief form that collected specific information relevant to the course: their work experience, when they took a statistics course, their proficiency with SPSS, their majors/minors, as well as their hometown. Teams included someone with recent statistics or SPSS experience, and a mix of student hometowns and work experiences. Second, at the start of class, students take multiple choice readiness assurance quizzes to prepare them for learning individually and with their team. The professor reviews the team quiz to identify concepts that need further clarification in class. Third, an application activity is designed so that the teams tackle (a) a significant problem, case, or question that addresses the class’ concepts, (b) make a specific choice among the given alternatives, (c) work on the same problem, and (d) reveal their choice at the same time. These are referred to as the 4S criteria. Teams are given 20–30 min to discuss the activity’s options and select their response. We designed activities that contain the 4S elements around key marketing research concepts (please contact the authors for examples) (i.e., mobile research, ethics, problem definition, sampling, questionnaire design, statistical analysis, and sentiment analysis). Fourth, team members provide feedback to their teammates twice during the semester to promote team improvement (Sweet and Michaelson 2012).

In her review of medical, education, and business TBL articles published from 2003 to 2011, Sisk (2011) found evidence of higher student satisfaction, engagement, and exam scores for those in classes using the TBL method. Additionally, researchers have reported that TBL enhances students’ course engagement, critical thinking, and content knowledge (Koles et al. 2010; Thomas and Bowen 2011; Sweet and Michaelsen 2012; Vaughn et al. 2013).