| This study compares the effectiveness of a course of study in which the instructional methods employed are primarily experimental in nature with a course in which the methods used are primarily lecture and discussion. Education is moving toward a more applications oriented approach to the classroom experience, yet much of the research in the field has either not addressed the issue of the relative effectiveness of alternative methods in sufficient depth, or, for various reasons, the research has been inconclusive. The subjects in this study were adult students in an engineering management course taught at the Defense Systems Management College. A pretest-posttest control group experimental design was employed involving a control group that numbered 360 and a treatment group of 420. The control group was taught using lecture discussion methods, and the treatment group was provided an experientially based project which featured a design problem that required students to plan for, design, build, and test a small vehicle to meet specified performance and cost objectives. The results support the conclusions that students react more favorably to experiential methods (p = 0.0000), students learn more when experiential methods are used (p = 0.0001), and students are more likely to transfer learning to the workplace when experiential methods are employed (p = 0.0003). In addition, the analyses supported earlier work that found no significant relationship between student reactions and learning in the courses evaluated.;Secondary analyses investigated the factors that were most influential in determining initial levels of student technical management knowledge prior to exposure to the course of training. Among the findings were that education level, type of education, program management experience, and the nature of prior training courses attended were most influential, while the type of job most recently held and the interval elapsed since prerequisite training courses were attended were not significant at the 95% level of confidence. |
