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ERIC Number: EJ1025896
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014-Jun
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1052-5629
EISSN: N/A
Concrete Steps for Assessing the "Soft Skills" in an MBA Program
Ingols, Cynthia; Shapiro, Mary
Journal of Management Education, v38 n3 p412-435 Jun 2014
In 2006, our School of Management began the serious path of assessing both the "hard skills" (such as accounting, finance, and strategy) and the "soft skills" (such as leadership, team work, and ethics) of our MBA Program. The data generated from examining the "soft skills" that we want students to learn within our Organization Behavior courses quickly noted performance gaps between what the faculty hoped our students were learning and what students demonstrated that they knew. In this article, we will describe our assessment methods in detail, exploring three methods of assessment that we developed to assess "soft skills", specifically: using a commercially available 360-degree instrument, building our own instrument based on well-established theory, and reaching out to experts. We share how we transformed various course-embedded deliverables into useable data and how we "closed the loop" and changed the curriculum within our MBA Program. We provide processes and instruments that could be used by other institutions struggling to make measureable (assessable and actionable) any of their own soft-skill MBA competencies.
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://sagepub.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive; Tests/Questionnaires
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Massachusetts
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A