| In the field of education, the developments based on the changing perspectives of learning have created a need for the development and improvement of instructional methodologies at all levels of education. One of the existing methodologies involves the use of experiential exercises where students learn course topics through hands-on exercises. The use of experiential exercises is highly common especially in business education. The effectiveness of these exercises on learning, however, is not adequately explored. Instructors who employ experiential exercises report positive feedback. Yet this feedback is on the experience of teaching, not on academic research into learning outcomes.; In different fields of business education, students' intimidation from some quantitative topics such as linear programming encourages educators to depend firmly on experiential exercises. The popular uses of experiential exercises need to be supported by rigorously designed assessment studies that evaluate whether, how, and why particular experiential exercises work. The understandings of how and why certain exercises are effective would help the transfer of these exercises or their positive aspects to different educational platforms and fields.; This research takes business education, specifically linear programming education, as focus. It evaluates a popular experiential exercise in linear programming within the field of business education: the LEGO exercise. The effectiveness of the exercise was investigated on undergraduate students assigned to three different treatment groups. Two groups received two different representations of the LEGO exercise while one group was used as a control. The participants' knowledge and learning were tested by pre and posttests.; The study reveals that regardless of the representational differences, the LEGO exercise significantly increases students' understandings of linear programming subjects. In both groups using the two different representations of the LEGO exercise, the participants significantly increased their cognitive ability related to linear programming as evidenced by their higher posttest scores compared to their pretest scores. The data also suggests that there are gender differences in learning. The assessment tests revealed that females tended to learn better in interactive environments where cognition is distributed among participants and objects as opposed to isolated cognitive processes. Males, on the other hand, appeared to learn well in both environments, which... |
