Quantitative Assessment of a Critical Thinking Skills Intervention within an Accelerated MBA Capstone Course

The need for graduate business education, and in particular Masters of Business Administration (MBA) programs, to foster the development of the critical thinking skills of its graduates has increased. Employers of MBA graduates desire sound critical thinking and decision making skills in their MBA hires. An increasing body of academic literature questions the effectiveness of MBA curricula and teaching pedagogy in developing students' critical thinking skills. This dissertation study adds to the related literature by quantifying the critical thinking skills of a sample of students within one MBA program's accelerated capstone course. Specifically, this study measured the impact of a pedagogical intervention comprised of an application of Bloom's taxonomy and Socratic questioning pedagogy to a series of case studies within the MBA program capstone course. The Business Critical Thinking Skills Test (BCTST), a standardized assessment of critical thinking skills, was used to measure the sampled students' critical thinking skills. A pre- and post-test research design compared the BCTST assessment scores of an intervention group exposed to the intervention compared to that of a control group not exposed to the intervention. This study tested for statistically significant correlations between participants' assessment scores and the independent variables age, undergraduate GPA, and undergraduate mathematics record. Results indicated that the critical thinking skills of the full intervention sample did not improve but did improve for an intervention sub-sample with BCTST post-test outliers removed. A statistically significant correlation between undergraduate GPA and students' BCTST scores was determined. Correlations between student age and undergraduate mathematics record and students' BCTST scores were not statistically significant.