By Richard John Stapleton
I submitted an article including most of this material and data to the Academy of Management Review in 1997 and the editor sent it back telling me it was too quantitative for the AMR, suggesting I send it to the Academy of Management Journal, which was more quantitative. I polished the article some after the AMR review, but I did not send it to the Academy of Management. I got most of the data and ideas published in refereed business management proceedings articles and in the Transactional Analysis Journal, and I printed the article as a chapter in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds.
Few business professors not using the case method wanted to read in the top management professional journal of the US that the case method really was the best teaching method for teaching business management, and most teachers in fields other than business management, except perhaps law, probably would have thought it bizarre and impractical.
I do not assert the data in this article prove the case method would work best for business teachers everywhere in all courses, or that it would work for all teachers anywhere teaching any subject; but I do assert the data provide compelling evidence that case method Game-Free I’m OK—You’re OK Adult—Adult Democratic processes produced valuable learning for business students at Georgia Southern University, irrespective of my being ranked in the lowest 25 percent of business faculty as an instructor on student evaluations up to 2001.
Our (Stapleton & Murkison, 2001 ) article “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations: A Study of Correlations Between Instructor Excellence, Study Production, Learning Production, and Expected Grades,” published as the lead article in an issue of the Journal of Management Education, dispelled the bad press student evaluations caused me for over twenty years at Georgia Southern. I was professor S in the study. I am the only professor or teacher of any sort I know of who has any quantitative longitudinal research data showing his teaching worked for former students in the real world, shown here in this article.
Our Optimizing Fairness article has by now been cited as a reference in 91 refereed professional journal articles in several fields, several since 2021, proving the article is still being read and cited in serious research articles on how to evaluate teaching. The article showed that student evaluations in colleges and universities unfairly discriminated against professors using teaching methods and processes such as the case method. After our Optimizing Fairness article was published in 2001 Georgia Southern University added Study Production, Learning Production, and Expected Grades questions to the student evaluation form administered to every instructor and professor at Georgia Southern at the end of every course. Hopefully the article has caused the same to happen at many colleges and universities. You can read a full copy of Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations by clicking on the Fair Student Evaluations prompt in the menu of the Effective Learning Report atop this page.
Most teachers and professors were scripted to use the ego states, transactional patterns, classroom layouts, teaching methods, and testing methods they use by copying and learning by osmosis the ego states, teaching methods, etc. that were used by their favorite teachers during their years of schooling getting their degrees.
Teachers once scripted rarely change the methods of their learning processes throughout their teaching careers, despite having little or no data or evidence showing their learning processes worked in the real world for their students.
As indicated in my “RJS Athletic, Business, and Academic Vita”, published in the Effective Learning Report, I never had a case method course in my years of schooling getting my degrees. I learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu and Rexford Hauser, two Harvard Business School doctorates, at what is now Louisiana University-Lafayette, as an associate professor my first year in academia after getting my doctorate at Texas Tech University in 1969.
Learning how the case method works is not an easy thing to do. I never would have learned how it works had the case method not been required in every course in the management department at Louisiana University-Lafayette at the time. My first semester there I felt uncomfortable using the case method, having serious doubts my students were learning anything of value, prompting me to accept a new position, at a higher salary, making me in the process one of the highest paid professors at Georgia Southern University.
During my second semester at Louisiana University-Lafayette it dawned on me how the case method worked, and I used nothing but the case method throughout my career teaching business at Georgia Southern, making me a case method lone wolf, the only professor in the business school using the case method, also making me a pariah at times, in the culture of the school. Fortunately, some of my colleagues realized I was producing OK learning for some of my students and we got along. Paul LaGrone, the business school dean that recruited me to Georgia Southern in 1970 told me in a golf cart at the annual School of Business Golf Tournament in about 1992 that “Everything would have been fine if you just had not used those damn circles.”
I used circle classroom layouts requiring my learners to rearrange their desks from row and column classroom layouts to circle layouts, with desks positioned around the perimeter of the room. This upset some authoritarian faculty and administrators, and probably some authoritarian students as well, when they heard about it, even though I made sure my democratic learners put their desks back in respectful orderly row and column layouts when class was over.
The Lecture Method
Lecture systems purport to transmit knowledge to students in the form of facts, rules, procedures, techniques, theories, and concepts. The assumption is that this material represents what exists or will exist in the real world, or will be useful in the real world, and, if students memorize and master the material for tests, they should be able to do a better job in dealing with the real world after they graduate than they would have had they not memorized and mastered the material. This overall process is basically a top-down deductive process. The material is presented by a superior instructor to students who supposedly retain the material in memory. The material contained in memory will later be applied to perceived phenomena in the real world of the student at the time. Based on this memorization and application, the student, it is hoped, will be able to deduce additional relevant phenomena about the situation in question at the time and understand and deal with the situation better than would have been the case had the student not memorized what the instructor instructed him or her with back in college. To what degree this process works is another matter; many students think they forget most of what is memorized for tests three weeks after the course is over.
Lecture method tests frequently contain true-false and multiple-choice questions. This is the most authoritarian method of all, allowing top-down I’m OK—You’re Not OK lecturing of supposedly “right answers” that Less OK or Not OK students have to memorize for tests in order to be OK.
The Seminar Method
This method entails the assigning and reading of published research articles, books, and other materials to be discussed in small groups or classes. The articles and books may contain essays, business histories, concepts, theories, techniques, literature reviews, hypotheses, statistical methods, and research findings. Students and discussants generally discuss what they have read and take exams covering the discussed material. The exams or tests generally include essay questions. A major assumption of the method is that students can remember what they read and do not require oral recitation in class by an instructor. The method is relatively democratic but the learning and testing are concerned about how well students memorized what supposedly superior authors thought about the real world in most courses.
The Computer Game Method
The computer game method simulates a hypothetical company operating in a hypothetical industry. Students learn to make decisions required to “run” the simulated company, such as how much money to spend on advertising, whether to hire more people, whether to increase inventory or production, whether to borrow more money, and the like. Assuming the simulated hypothetical company and industry contain decisions and processes similar to those found in most real world companies students might be exposed to in later life, students should know more about what to in those companies than people not exposed to computer game courses in business school. Computer game approaches are also basically top-down, in that students are told the rules of the game and what decisions to make by the teacher. Based on these general rules and other concepts taught by teachers, the students deduce what to do making their decisions in the game. Presumably students who win do so because of using superior deductive logic with the taught rules and concepts, although many claim the key success factor is learning secret algorithms in the computer program not taught by the teacher. A strength of computer games is that they teach students to seek information to use for competitive purposes. Games effectively teach competitive organizational behavior, regardless of the degree to which they teach students about the real world in general. Various teachers use various schemes for grading computer game performance, but true-false and multiple-choice questions are rarely used. This method is somewhat democratic in that students get to think for themselves, somewhat, but what they think about is an abstract model, not problems, opportunities, facts, and data that naturally occur in the real world.
The On-Line Method
This method does not entail a teacher teaching the content of the course in person in class. Students are assigned material to read and learn on-line using home computers, mobile devices, and the like to complete lesson plans and take tests on-line. The teacher may have a few on-line sessions with students individually and as a group dealing with special issues involved in accessing and using the material with computers and explaining what students could not understand on their own with in ad hoc emails. I did not ask questions about this method in this research because this method was not used much for college courses when this research was conducted, being a relatively new innovation, having significantly increased in usage during and after the Covid epidemic. Since there is little or no face-to-face transactions between teachers and students when this method is used, transactional analysis, or TA, is generally rendered irrelevant, since you cannot see or feel ego states and transactions happening between you and others. You can detect to some degree ego states and transactions changing to some extent by the way and what teachers and students type in emails back and forth dealing with on-line course issues and problems. It’s possible that no learning occurs at all in these courses, as learning is defined by radical constructivists below.
Earthian humans and societies around Spaceship Earth may now be learning less because of being forced to use computers, mobile devices, text messages, passwords, user names, etc. emails, etc. as they attempt to do business withmenu systems, robots, and websites in isolation instead of in face-to-face and voice-to-voice conversations. This method is pretty much fill-in-the-blank monkey see-monkey do authoritarianism.
The Case Method
The case method (Christensen, 1992; Christensen & Hanson, 1986; Dooley & Skinner, 1977; Stapleton, 1976, 1985, 1990; Towl, 1969) is a bottom-up inductive approach in which students are exposed to a large number of real world samples of human states of affairs in the form of written cases. Students are required to study, analyze, and discuss the cases face-to- face in groups. The major task is to identify problems and opportunities in the cases and decide what to do about them. In this process, students learn to communicate with fellow students and sell their ideas about what to do
about problems and opportunities in the cases. They also learn about possible problems, processes, scripts, and recurrences that exist in the real world. Students are generally graded on their overall performance based on class participation and case write-ups. True-false and multiple-choice questions are rarely used with the case method. The teacher’s job is to lead and motivate learners in the class discussions making sure relevant points are brought up and explaining anything students are not able to understand on their own.
The main reason most teachers do not use the case method is that teachers must grade class participation that requires making subjective judgements about the performance of each learner relative to the performance of the class as a whole. The case method is relatively democratic and requires learners to think for themselves in a learning environment that to some extent simulates what really goes on in the real world..
Entrepreneurship in the Real World
Most entrepreneurial decisions are wrong, or at least sub-optimum. No one knows for sure what he or she is doing when a new venture is created. According to Brandt (1989), the best of entrepreneurs with the best of entrepreneurial educations may have little more than a 50-50 chance of success. On the other hand, naive or impulsive entrepreneurs, with little or no education for the entrepreneurial task, have an even lower a priori chance.
The entrepreneurial task entails deciding upon what to do, where to do it, when to do it, how to do it, and by whom it should be done. The what and where decisions are probably the most vital and are what primarily distinguish entrepreneurs from other types of players in business. What and where decisions are among the toughest kinds to make because there are so many possible things entrepreneurs might do and so many places in which they might be done. In order to decide rationally what to do the entrepreneur would have to rank the possible returns for all possible ventures in various locations. With a little imagination, these possibilities can easily run into the thousands.
In most cases the entrepreneur confines his or her thinking to a domain bounded by more practical limits, using what Herbert Simon called “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1957), but, even here, the problem may be very complex. Rationally choosing among as few as 10 or 15 what and where combinations requires knowing about sources of financing, numbers and locations of possible customers, technological processes, transportations ystems, supplier relations, employee availabilities, organizational structures, how it all hangs together, and expected returns to investors in the short and long runs, for each alternative—which might require several megabytes of memory.
The rational entrepreneur would decide what to do based on an understanding of the above data, which entails a more complex problem than problems faced by players inside businesses, such as managers, accountants, engineers, salespeople, computer experts, and hourly employees. Most problems inside established businesses are relatively finite with deterministic answers, given expert technical knowledge and skill. Answers to these problems can normally be found using top-down deductive processes involving concepts and techniques taught and learned in schools and on the job through experience. Given good training, most employees can learn how to do their jobs inside businesses with a high probability of success. This is not true for entrepreneurs because there is no way to train someone to do something that has never been done before. Assuming business educators could instruct entrepreneurs with what they would need to know for guaranteed success, which they in reality cannot, they would tell them what exists in the real world and what will exist given the inevitability of change. Carland, Carland, and Stewart (1996) assert entrepreneurs learn to see what is not there. How could a teacher teach someone to see what is not there? Should teachers teach students to “see” constructions inside their own heads?
In my opinion, as a transactional analyst, it seems to me most successful entrepreneurs are simply lucky enough to be in or find environments in which they can succeed acting out what they have been scripted to do by inevitable infinite cause-effect chains.
Business Plans Written in A Business School
It’s obvious entrepreneurs have to be able to create business plans, however difficult it might be to explain how they do it. They have to develop the ability to visualize, conceptualize, and coordinate future time-sequenced events in spatial dimensions and sometimes put this down on paper. It seems entrepreneurship teachers should require entrepreneurial students how to create business plans in sink or swim processes.
Following is a listing of business plans and the number of times theywere created by gender by undergraduate entrepreneurial students in my classes in the Georgia Southern University business school during the years 1972-1982 (Stapleton, 1984).
Each student in the classes was told to write a business plan for a small business he or she might one day like to start, own, and operate. Here is a listing of numbers of those business plans by student gender and by type of business planned.
Males: N = 290
Tavern/Pub(19), Franchise Restaurant(14), Sporting Goods Store(12), Weight Lifting Gym(12), Non-Franchise Restaurant(8), Stereo Equipment Store(7), Convenience Grocery Store(7), Auto Repair(7), Men’s Clothing Store(7), Golf Driving Range(7), Liquor/ Beer Package Store(6), Lawn Mowing Service(6), Miniature Golf Course(6), Barber Shop(5), Construction Company(5), Racquetball Gym(5), Auto Parts Store(4), Insurance Agency(4), Movie Theater(4), Printing Company(4), Gun Shop(3), Service Station(3), Car Wash(3), Roller Skating Rink(3), Catfish Farm(2), Clothing Manufacturer(2), Carpet Outlet(2), Water Well Service(2), Bowling Lanes(2), Bookstore(2), Tennis Club(2), Motel(2), Running Shoe Store(2), Pinball Arcade(2), Dry Cleaners/Laundry(2), Jeep Dealership(2), Bait and Tackle Shop(2), Golf Club Repair(2), Home Rentals(2), Pecan Grove(2), Sailboat Rental(2), Bicycle Shop(2), Self-Service Laundromat(2), Floral Shop(2), Firewood Business(2), Bluejeans Store(2), T-Shirt Store(2), Egg Farm(2), Landscaping Service(2), Golf Pro Shop(2), Insulation Company(2), Poultry Farm(2), Tefl on Motor Treatment(2), Metal Building Company, Diet Restaurant, Crab Fishing, Swimming Pool Company, Tile Company, Wallpaper Studio, Pool Hall, Muffl er Shop, Upholstery Shop, Furniture Store, Fishing Camp, Guard Dog Service, Shalkee Direct Sales, Oil Distributorship, Logging Business, Refrigerator Repair, Real Estate Agency, Pet Kennel, Clock Business, Ambulance Service, Tire Retreading Company, News and Record Shop, Box Packaging Company, Wallpaper Installation Company, Radio Station, Pig Production Operation, Trailer Park, Trucking Company, Addressing System Company, Tree Surgery, Formal Clothing Rental, Miniwarehouse Storage, Dress Shop, Tool Sales, Charter Flying Service, Apartment Rentals, Crop dusting, Shoe Store, Paint and Landscaping Company, Scaffolding Sales and Service, Ready-Mix Concrete, Citrus Farm, Door to Door Bookselling, Roofi ng Company, Cemetary Vaults, Taxidermy Shop, Seafood Emporium, Parachute School, Frame Shop, ExterminatingService, Fish and Aquarium Sales, Shrimping Company, Dirt Hauling Business, Scuba Diving School, Clunker Car Rental, Mobile Home Park, Bagel Shop, Plumbing Company, Produce Company, Commercial Fishing, Tanning Parlor, Butcher Shop, Nitrogen Fixing Product Sales, Import Gift Shop, Music Company, Recording Studio, Karate School, Silk Screen T-Shirt Business, Photography Shop, Grain Moving Business, Travel Agency, Golf Pro Shop, Charter Bus Service, Antique Store, Wood Heater Store, Wholesale auto Auction Company, Permanent Wave hair Treatment Product, Golf Course, Land Surveying, Aluminum Windows, TV Sales and Service, Hunting and Fishing Guide Service, Maid Service, Painting and Renovating Service, Nursing Home.
Females: N = 74
Dress Shop/Boutique(15), Needle and Thread Shop(7), Bridal Shop(4), Slender Health Spa(3), Art Supply Store(3), Ceramics Store(2), Gift Shop(2), Photography Studio(2), Used Car Lot(2), Dunkin Donuts Shop(2), Home Maid Service(2), Beauty Shop, Custom Industrial Manufacturing, Beer and Wine Package Store, Travel Agency, Answering Service, T-Shirt Lettering and Sales, Dog Kennel, General Insurance Agency, Pork Rinds Sales, Ice Crème Shop, Plant Shop, Marina, Produce Store, Handicraft Store, Rental Office Complex, Limosine Service, Sporting Goods Store, Bark Chips for Landscaping, Tennis Clothing Store, Tailor Shop, Flower Shop, Personnel Agency, Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant, Taco Hut, Dance Studio, Arby’s Roast Beef, Roller Rink, Movie Theater, PA/RINT Company, MaryKay Cosmetics.
Most of the students wrote about businesses they had thought about years earlier. Many had carried these ideas around in their memories for five or more years. Based on a sample of 70 students, over 50 percent had created the business idea before taking the course. While most of these students were about 21 years old, the average age of business idea conception was 15.5 years. Most of the ideas were developed in the hometowns of the students and 66 percent chose their hometown as the location for the business. It is obvious that many of the business type choices were based on stereotypical gender-based activity preferences.
Most of the above plans involved little real entrepreneurial planning. Since the students only had about five weeks to complete the plans after they were assigned, few did any environmental scanning or considering of different types of businesses or locations. They generally ignored what and where entrepreneurial decisions complexity by writing about a business they had learned about through experience in their hometowns.
Almost none did any marketing research to identify and quantify customers with which to make sales projections. Still, they wrote a “plan” for a business, in that they basically described how to operate the business. They told where it would be located, generated numbers for dollars of start-up capital required and said something about where they would get the money, and they projected income statements and balance sheets as required by any business plan.
Where did these words and numbers come from? They had learned how the businesses basically operated by virtue of being around such businesses, as employees and customers, and they generally created from thin air numbers for sales and costs that they plugged into blank income statement and balance sheet formats. The plugged-in numbers and resulting totals generally reflected not what the created business would likely yield based on real world events but what the learners wanted it to yield.
The learners had some idea about how much income they wanted to receive in 5 or 10 years, so they manipulated their numbers to show that much as profit. Figuring out what their net worth would be in 10 years was not a problem. This was deterministic since net worth would logically follow given that so much profit was supposedly made each year and that so much profit was retained in the business. This required assuming that certain financial policies and decisions were made.
Figuring out what to assume was a problem. In some respects, you might say the above experience reflected poor teaching, and that I should have controlled the process more and should hav told the students exactly what to do to make the exercise more academically respectable. Perhaps students should have been assigned to teams to work on plans for businesses in various locations specified by me the teacher, rather than require each learner to create his/her own small business.
On the other hand, you might say the exercise was a success because it gave students some sense of what it is like to create and start a business in the real world. They were at least exposed to the nature of the problem encountered by entrepreneurs when they make what and where entrepreneurial decisions. The exercise enabled them to utilize, learn from, and improve the business experience they had developed on their own.
They learned how little they knew about starting a business. Since each learner was required to make copies of her or his plan for each student in the class, each learner in the class studied and saw what all other learners created and developed. Each learner was able to compare her or his plan with the plans of 20 or 30 other learners and could see how well she or he relatively did writing the plan and doing what was assigned. Each learner vicariously learned from others in the class because of being exposed to 20 or 30 alternative business plans involving many environments and processes. The learners said they learned a great deal from the experience and said they found it satisfying.
As shamefully imprecise as some Critical Parent academics and business people might think the process was, it is roughly analogous to what goes on the real world when people on the street decide to start their own business. Implausibly, it is also roughly analogous to the process the ex-entrepreneur and now president of the US Donald Trump used to start his businesses that went bankrupt, but which, without furnishing audited financial statements of any sort to prove it, he said made him over one billion dollars. Donald Trump is one of the worst role models for serious entrepreneurs that ever lived, but somehow here he is now president of the US trying to Make “America” Great Again by turning the US into a fascist dictatorship.
Cognitive Structures
The case can be made that the above business plans were scripts selected as a function of the schemata of the students. Script and schema concepts are found in the areas of cognitive psychology, transactional analysis, and organizational behavior. Cognitive psychology is concerned with the internal structures people develop as they experience life that are used to understand and deal with current experience.
Schemata
A schema is a mental framework developed through experience and stored in memory that determines what environmental stimuli will be recognized and processed by a person and what will be ignored (Eckblad,1981; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Nisser, 1976; Piaget, 1971; Thorndyke & Hayes-Roth, 1979). A schema is what causes a person to respond as he or she does when called on to do a certain thing, such as develop a business plan. By virtue of living in a business-oriented society people develop schemata in the form of words, pictures, sounds, and perhaps smells, of what the word business means. The same is true for words such as plan. Therefore almost anyone reared in a business society can write a “business plan”, based on schemata and scripts stored in memory.
Scripts
A script is a repetitive sequence of verbal, motor, and kinesthetic steps learned through experience that is required or useable in various roles and situations (Abelson, 1981; Allen & Allen, 1988; Berne, 1964; Carlson, 1981; Gioia & Poole, 1984; Lord & Kernan, 1987; Schank & Abelson, 1977; Stapleton & Murkison, 1990; Stapleton, Murkison, & Stapleton, 1998; Steiner, 1974). There are situational scripts and individual scripts. All businesses entail differentiated situational scripts that are acted out in various slots and functions. Customers in restaurants are required to act out a situational script to get served (Schank & Abelson, 1977). All sit- down restaurants have similar scripts. To eat in a restaurant, you park, enter, get seated, order, eat, pay the check, and leave. The script entails certain words and phrases at various steps in the process. After people have experienced a few restaurants as customers, they generally know what to expect in most restaurants after that and know what to say and do.
Differentiated scripts exist in most businesses: banks, taverns and pubs, dress shops, travel stores, home depots, fitness centers, golf courses, floral and gift shops, auto parts stores, discount centers, and what have you. People learn the lines and behavioral routines of the script through experience. In large organizations different departments and functions entail different scripts for employees, depending on the technological aspects of the roles and departments, and the individual scripts of the supervisors and managers who control the departments and functions (Gioia & Poole, 1984; Lord & Kernan,1987). Individual scripts are developed as a function of unique experiences in various environments.
Humans are scripted in families to assume certain roles in society and behave in certain repetitive ways by messages transmitted from parents to offspring (Allen & Allen, 1988; Berne, 1963, 1964, 1972; Cornell, 1988;English, 1988; Steiner, 1974).
Shank and Abelson (1977) describe relations between experience, scripts, and understanding as follows:
“By subscribing to a script-based theory of understanding, we are making some strong claims about the nature of the understanding process. In order to understand the actions that are going on in a given situation, a person must have been in that situation before. That is, understanding is knowledge-based. The actions of others make sense only insofar as they are part of a stored pattern of actions that have been previously experienced. Deviations from the standard pattern are handled with some difficulty.. . Understanding, then, is a process by which people match what they see and hear to pre-stored groupings of actions that they have already experienced. New information is understood in terms of old information . . . .We will meet other bases for understanding, but we view human understanding as heavily script-based. A human understander comes equipped with thousands of scripts. He uses these scripts almost without thinking (Shank & Abelson, 1977, pp. 67-68).. . . . Understanding, then, is sometimes all plan-based, sometimes all script-based, and sometimes a mix. The main point is that in order to understand you must predict and in order to predict there must beknowledge of how events connect (Shank & Abelson, 1977, p. 78.)”
Script-based understanding is based on past experience and prior learning whereas plan-based understanding is based on developing new knowledge peculiar to a current situation based on current research and facts, data, phenomena, etc.
Learning by Doing Processes
Do entrepreneurs in the real world use scripts when they start businesses? Yes, they do. Based on a sample of 2,000 entrepreneurs randomly selected from across the United States my colleague Gene Murkison and I generated data we published in “Scripts and Entrepreneurship” (Stapleton & Murkison, Transactional Analysis Journal, 1990) showing 35 percent of the respondents (N=445) created the idea for their operating small business in childhood or adolescence. Seventy-six percent of the respondents started their businesses within 100 miles of their hometowns.
As shown in Table 1, in general failure rates were higher for businesses based on ideas created at younger ages, indicating people get better at creating entrepreneurial ideas as they learn more scripts and more about what is really going on in the real world.
TABLE 1
Age of Idea Conception and Failure Rates
Age at First Flicker Number %. Cumulative % Failure Rate
0-9 42 9.43 9.43 . .4474
10-13 28 6.29 15.72. . 4286
14-15 16 3.59 19.31 .7500
16-17 25 5.61 24.92 .4800
18-19 45 10.11 35.03 .4889
20-21 52 11.68 46.71 5000
22-25 77 17.30 64.01 .2338
26-30 49 11.01 75.02 3469
31-35 35 7.86 82.88 .2857
36-40 32 7.19 90.07 .3458
Over 40 44 9.88 99.95 .1538
TOTAL = 445
All Earthian humans have learned certain scripts by virtue of their unique past experiences and in the process have developed certain schemata. The problem is these schemata and scripts will only be effective in certain kinds of situations, and there is a good probability a person will use the wrong schema and script in the wrong situation. Most people after reaching age 28 or so tend to quit learning and developing new schemata and scripts, having learned to live with and become dedicated to schemata and scripts already learned, generally trying to conserve interactions with places, people, organizations, and other objects in the environment using those schemata and scripts from then on, if possible.
For more detail on this process, see my article “The Velocity of Youth Mobility,” using longitudinal data generated in my doctoral research, published in the Atlanta Economic Review in 1973, cited in my RJS Athletic, Business, and Academic Vita, published in the Effective Learning Report. See the prompt in the menu at the top of this page for more information about this research.
In other words, Earthian humans explore and experiment with the external real world less and less after about age 28 and attempt to conserve their current life patterns using the internal cognitive structures they have already developed. They tend to become closed systems operating in what they hope are closed systems and maintain as long as possible the interactions with people and other objects in the environment that have enabled them to be satisfied or successful thus far.
Radical Constructivism
Structural determinism has been discussed at length by radical constructivists (Allen & Allen, 1991; Loria, 1991; Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1987; Von Glaserfeld, 1988) who assert that no one ever has true knowledge about the real world. All people know is what they have constructed in their memories about what they think the real world is like, starting at birth. Since people have no way of observing ontological features of the real world in general, what they think is the real world is simply the internal representations or concepts they have constructed about the real world. In all cases there is a wide variance between these internal representations and what exists in the real world. Even assuming a person can construct and store in memory an accurate picture, concept, or structure of what the real world she or he has observed and experienced is really like, given the inevitability of change in the real world, it is inevitable the cognitive structure contained in memory will become inaccurate as time elapses. Therefore no one ever “knows” what any real world is really like for very long.
Entrepreneurs, if they have any hope of success, must either have developed good internal representations of what their real worlds are like or they must have some special means of learning ontologically or veridically about their real worlds on an ad hoc basis. A good entrepreneur would need relevant scripts stored in memory that would apply in various environments and would need schemata that would enable or compel him or her to focus on relevant phenomena in exposed environments. The ideal scenario would be for the entrepreneur to always be able to perceive the environment veridically, i.e., see it for what it really is, but, according to constructivists, this is impossible.
Whether the success of successful entrepreneurs is due more to superior knowledge of the real world and acting accordingly or to simply being luckily at the right time and place with the right technological knowledge or scripts is an interesting question. It may well be that successful entrepreneurs know more about the real world in general than non-entrepreneurs, and at least one writer (Schrage,1965) thinks veridical perception, i.e. knowing ontologically what is going on in the environment, is the major key success factor for entrepreneurs. It is possible successful entrepreneurs understand the real worlds they interact with better than non-entrepreneurs, even though they might not know much about the real world in general. All of this would suggest, however, that reading how-to books or listening to lectures about business theories and concepts would not do a prospective entrepreneur much good.
Dialectical Learning
According to Gagne (1977, p. 3), learning is “a change in human disposition or capability, which persists for some period of time, and which is not simply ascribable to processes of growth.”
A change in disposition would entail a change in schemata. According to Anderson (1977, p. 439):
“Schema change is the sine qua non of the acquisition of knowledge as opposed to the mere aggregation of information. I speculated that large-scale accommodation may be a dialectical process which entails a confrontation with difficulties in one’s current schema and coming to appreciate the power of an alternative. People resist change in high-level schemata. In the first place, well-developed schemata have great assimilative power. What is supposed to be a new view may be assimilated by the old. Again, it is probably difficult for teachers to distinguish between assimilation and accommodation. People whose important beliefs are threatened will attempt to defend their positions, dismiss objections, ignore contraexamples, keep segregated logically incompatible schemata. If this is a reasonable account, then a forthrightly dialectical method such as Socratic teaching is a plausible candidate as a deliberate instrument for causing students to change schemata.”
The case method and the Socratic method involve discussion but the methods involve different types of reasoning. The purpose of a case method discussion is to understand and comprehend the case and inductively decide what to do about it, whereas the purpose of the Socratic method is to deductively arrive at a provably true conclusion.
Case method learners learn by arguing back and forth about what is right in a dialectical dialogical process. An acceptable “truth” or true story will gradually emerge in the course of a good discussion, but a provably true “right” answer will not. What seems to be the truth at the beginning of a case method discussion in most cases is not what seems to be the truth at the end of the discussion. Students who started out thinking and arguing that the final “accepted” truth was the truth feel confirmed and triumphant at the end of the hour, and students who started out thinking and arguing that something else was the truth may learn that they were wrong, in the opinion of the class.
The teacher or students cannot prove what is the real truth or right answer regardless of how long the discussion lasts, but they learn that some possible truths are better than others, and in most cases most learners in the group will agree that one truth is better than the others. On the other hand, some hardheaded people seem never to accept that they are wrong after a discussion regardless of the evidence.
In some cases, however, learners learn their schemata and scripts were not the best ones, not as good as those of others, and their dispositions to act in future situations will be different as a result. In good dialectical case method discussion processes, the communication skills of some learners are improved, producing another form of learning—better skills and capabilities. According to constructivists, the only way someone can learn is for their internal cognitive structures to change, which entails a rerouting of neural pathways in the brain.
This explains why about half the voters in the US, less than one-third of USian eligible voters,voted for Donald Trump again November 5, 2024 despite irrefutable facts and evidence about his atrocious and insidious lies and crimes, his damnable moral and ethical behavior, and his avowed intention to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he gets elected USian president again, having been graphically described almost daily for over eight years in broadcasts throughout the US by newscasters in mass media, in which many of them play a psychological Game that might be called GEE, YOU’REWONDERFIUL, MS./MRS./MR. NEWSCASTER, coming across on TV screens more like programmed plastic robots than authentic human beings Trump’s voters did not “learn” a thing in the process. Facts, data, and evidence broadcasted was like water running off a duck’s back.
I attempted in 1992 to determine whether case method students were more successful in the real world than non-case method students (Stapleton, Murkison & Stapleton, 1993, 1994).
This study compared 115 students in the Georgia Southern business school who took two or more inductive, relatively graded case method courses with 94 business students from the same department in the same school who avoided the case method courses. All students of the school who graduated during 1972-1987 who took two or more of my case method courses, who had snail mail addresses that could be found in 1992, were surveyed, as were all management majors, generating a total sample of 1,380. There were 1,091 management majors in the survey; 529 took case method courses and 562 avoided them. There were some 2,000 management graduates during 1972-1987.
Gene Murkison and I thought 5 years out of business school using what had been taught and learned would be sufficient time to develop credible wisdom regarding the efficacy of what had been taught and learned. Some of the respondents had been using what they had learned in the GA SO business school 15 years.
The reported incomes of the two groups were compared and the respondents were asked what teaching method they thought prepared them best for their careers. They were asked to list the four courses they thought were most valuable in their careers, and what they would recommend as improvements for the business curriculum. They were asked to list the four business professors from whom they thought they learned the most. They were asked to indicate how they currently spent their working days. They were guaranteed anonymity and the cover letter was signed by a professor who had never used the case method (Murkison).
The results are shown in Table 2. Twenty-seven of the 199 respondents were small business owners in 1987, indicating they were entrepreneurs who had morphed into small business owners. But no doubt some of the small business owners inherited their businesses, and you might think they were not real entrepreneurs since they did not make the what and where decisions causing the business to exist. But a case can also be made that they made an entrepreneurial decision about where they would live, since they had to decide to go back home and take over the family business rather than go somewhere else to start a new business in a potentially more profitable market, or try to find a job somewhere enslaved to a boss working in a large corporation who would tell them what to do.
Based on evidence presented earlier in this paper. it is obvious that many business students are scripted with entrepreneurial and small business ideas before they enter college. Those scripts were developed in childhood and adolescence working in family businesses, serving as employees in businesses, and being customers in business of various types. Research findings presented in this paper show that many entrepreneurs start businesses based on scripts they have stored in their memories for many years, and generally ignore alternative business types and markets in current reality when they start their businesses.
Constructivist philosophers assert that humans from birth onward construct what they think is the real world in their memories. By age 21 or so this constructed internal world starts causing a human to make some significant decisions, not the least of which include what to do for a living, where to live, when and whom to marry, how many children to have, and what kind of socio-economic role to act out. Eric Berne, the inventor of transactional analysis, said only trivial decisions are made using logic in the here and now, asserting important decisions such as these are scripted.
TABLE 2
Reported Incomes of the Respondents who Chose and Avoided Case Method Courses. Incomes are expressed in 1992 dollars. $1 in 1992 was equivalent in purchasing power to about $2.25 in 2024, adjusted for inflation, so incomes in 1992 should be multiplied by 2.25 to get a realistic perspective of value of 1992 incomes in 2024.
Case Method Choosers Case Method Avoiders
Total Sample
$59,999 (n=115) $46,565 (n=84)
p <.016
Males
$61,495 (n=97) $51,818 (n=55)
p <.13
Females
$48,654 (n=13). $35,611 (n=27)
p <.35
Entrepreneurs
$88,269 (n=13) $50,357 (n=14)
p <.066
Grade Point and Income Comparison by Gender
Females Males
Incomes
$39,850 (n=40) $57,993 (n=152)
p <.0024
Overall G.P.A.
3.084 (n=35) 2.676 (n=152)
p =.0000
Correlation Between Overall Grade Point Average and Incomes:
Pearson’s r = -.014
Correlation Between Grade Points in Case Method Courses and incomes:
Pearson’s r = .101
Incomes by Number of Case Method Courses Taken
1 $50,714 (n=14) 2 $47,879 (n=33) 3 $62,604 (n=24) 4 $61,250 (n=16) 5 or more $82,273 (n=11)
Pearson’s r = .245
Opinions of Former Students Regarding Their Work Days and Pedagogical Issues. Estimates of Percentage of Work Day Spent in Various Activities
Case Method Choosers % Case Method Avoiders %
Talking With People 35.1 Talking With People 26.06
Using a Computer 20.36 Using a Computer 17.65
Thinking 15.42 Thinking 16.6
Working With People 8.72 Working With People 12.36
Writing 7.87 Writing 10.94
Reading 7.44 Reading 7.76
Doing Arithmetic 4.81 Doing Arithmetic 6.44
Doing Manual Work 1.3 Doing Manual Work 4.34
Which Teaching Methodology Do You Think Prepared You Best For Your Career?
Case Method Choosers %. Case Method Avoiders %
Case Method 70.64 Case Method 73.07
Lecture Method 25.86 Lecture Method 23.07
Computer Game 3.68 Computer Game 1.28
Other 0.00 Other 1.28
Note: 42 respondents had taken a computer game course and 5 ranked it the best method. Case method avoiders avoided my case method courses using dialectical discussion for grading but took courses in which teacher used cases to supplement concepts used for standard tests.
Which Four of Your Business Courses Were Most Valuable in Your Career?
Numbers are number of times listed.
Case Method Choosers Case Method Avoiders
Business Policy 33 Accounting Principles I 25
Accounting Principles I 28 Marketing Principles 21
Marketing Principles 28 Bus Communications 19
Accounting Principles II 25 Business Law I 19
Small Business 25 Business Policy 18
Economic Principles I 24 Management Principles 18
Economic Principles II 24 Corporate Finance I 15
Business Law I 22 Intro Data Processing 12
Statistics 22 Organizational Behavior 12
Corporate Finance I 22 Statistics 12
Management Principles 21 Economic Principles I 11
Decision Science 20 Decision Science 10
Organizational Behavior 19 Accounting Principles II 9
Business Communications 16 Production I 9
Personnel 16 Personnel 8
Production I 16 Cobol I 7
Cobol I 10 Current Workplace Issues 7
Collective Bargaining 7 Systems Design I 7
Systems Design I 7 Data Base Management 5
Business Law II 5 Systems Design II 5
Consumer Economics 5 Economic Principles II 3
Human Relations 5
Intro Data Processing 5 Wage and Salary Adm. 3
Professional Selling 5 obol II 2
Real Estate 5 Corporate Finance II 2
Cost Accounting 4 Mgt. Information Systems 2
Systems Analysis I 4 Production II 2
Systems Analysis II 4 Real Estate 2
Tax Accounting 4 Systems Analysis I 2
Advertising 4 Cost Accounting 1
Staffing and Training 4 History of Management 1
Money and Banking 4 Tax Accounting I
If You Were to Design an Ideal Business Curriculum for this School, Based on Your Experience at this School and Career Experience, What Would You Suggest? Numbers are number of times a particular suggestion was listed.
Suggestions made once are omitted. There were approximately 50 separate suggestions.
Case Method Choosers Case Method Avoiders
More Case Method 34 More Case Method 23
More Guest Speakers 14 Software Packages 12
Teach Software Packages 8 More Internships 10
More Internships 5 Guest Speakers 10
Less Theory 4 More Field Research 6
More Organizational Skills 3 Job Hunting Skills 4
Career Planning Course 5 Oral Communication 2
College and university professors can use their favorite teaching method if students sign up and they have evidence their students are learning something of value. Data in this article suggest, but do not prove, that the case method is the best method for teaching entrepreneurship and business management. While I may think the case method is best method for learners in general based on my experience and research, this generalization is a mere proposition. If it can be proved to be wrong with better facts, data, and evidence than mine then so be it.
The fact over 70 percent of the former learners in our study said the case method prepared them best for their careers gives the case method credibility. The fact these learners overwhelmingly recommended that more case method teaching be added to the curriculum adds more credibility. The 13 entrepreneurs, who took more case method courses than others, had the highest reported incomes of all. The case method small business course in the study was the only elective course rated highly by case method choosers or avoiders. The capstone business policy course (taught by me using the case method, but not by others) required of all business majors was ranked the most valuable course by students who chose case method courses, whereas the non-case method business policy course was ranked fifth by learners who avoided case method courses.
The respondents were asked to list the names of four professors from whom they learned the most. I, using nothing but the case method, was listed as one of the top four learning producers 52 times. One other professor was listed 51 times, and several others were listed 20-30 times.
GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, PROFESSOR
I did my best during my teaching career not to play one of the most ubiquitous psychological Games played in schools, colleges, and universities: GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, PROFESSOR (GYWP).
I learned the name and dynamics of this psychological Game while learning about transactional analysis at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1975-1978. GYWP entails teachers and professors doing all they can to come across as wonderful teachers, instructors, and professors in the eyes and ears of admiring passive Critical Parent/Adapted Child students, learners, colleagues, administrators, parents, politicians and donors by teaching, lecturing, instructing, and interacting using primarily Nurturing Parent and Adapted Child ego states, investing considerable time and energy trying to appear not only competent but highly intelligent, knowledgeable, clever, talented, good-looking, caring, concerned, conscientious, congenial, friendly, collegial, considerate, cooperative, politically correct, and obedient and cooperative.
You might think I am playing GYWP in this article, maybe even making up the above numbers and data just to make myself look good as a professor. If so, rest assured I am not. Unlike Trump wanting paper copies of votes cast in his second presidential election (that he indubitably lost fair and square) to be hand-counted to prove what a wonderful president he had been and will be, I can probably find the original mailed-in paper source documents for the above research projects stored in boxes somewhere to prove the above numbers and data are real if anyone wants to hand count them. I will admit I did have some ulterior Adapted Child motives causing me to do the above research. In addition to doing what I was being paid to do as part of my Adult ego state contract as a professor of a university to do research and produce new knowledge and publish the results, I wanted to prove I had done a good job as a teacher using the facts and data of the research to keep from getting screwed when it came time to allot merit raise money to professors every year. In that regard I think I was moderately successful.
In my opinion, the major purpose of a teacher, instructor, or professor is to make learning happen in the minds of learners, not to lecture, dispense, or spoon-feed information using Critical Parent, Nurturing Parent and Adapted Child ego states to entertain and satisfy passive obedient Adapted Child students in impressive, cheerful, caring, nurturing, friendly or entertaining ways, teaching to and then using so-called objective tests containing test questions that almost all students in the course can memorize answers for so as to make mostly A’s and B’s in the course, to engender high grades for teachers from students on student evaluations, and by extension high grades for administrators assigned by parents, politicians, taxpayers, and others for hiring such wonderful teachers and professors to teach their above average kids, as in Garrison Kellor’s mythical Lake Wobegon.
I invested or wasted very little Parent and Child ego state energy in my courses trying to win playing the GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, PROFESSOR psychological Game. I used mostly Adult ego state energy causing my learners to learn.
The first thing I did in my classes was pass out a one-page course syllabus, a learning contract spelling out what I intended to do and what I required learners in the course to do, and tell them to read it as soon as they got their hands on it, as it circulated around the room.
The contract included my office hours, the name of the book to be used, what the course content was about, and how learners would be graded. A major clause in the contract was that students were required to read every assigned case before class and be prepared to lay it out to all class members if they were randomly selected to be a leader of the moment by a Classroom De-Gamer, a spinner, to start the class discussion of the day. I emphasized that I kept my office hours and would be available to discuss outside of class one-on-one problems they might have adapting and flexing to the course learning contract requirements or understanding technical or conceptual content in the cases and text material in the course book. There could be no coming into class late more than twice without grade consequences. There could be no covert or overt, social or ulterior, communication with individuals or cliques around you where you sat when someone had the floor talking to the whole group.
The contract asserted that you agreed to accept that a whole letter grade would be deducted from your course grade if the Classroom De-Gamer™ caught you unprepared.
Everyone in the class would receive a seating chart showing the names of all class members. Cutting class more than four times would have grade consequences. Peer ratings would be used to give learners feedback about what grades learners thought they deserved based on their overall performance. The main grade criterion was the quantity and quality of ideas a learner sold in the class market. A sale was someone coming up with an idea that you bought.
Each learner would rate every other learner on a 1-4 scale, 1 below average, 2 average, 3 good, 4 excellent. Those numbers were summed producing a group rank. Most of the time I agreed with the summed group scores. Regardless, I used my own judgement assigning final grades. I told them if they were not willing to accept this Adult learning contract they should leave now and drop the course, reminding them that no student at Georgia Southern was required to take one of my courses to graduate.
I came into class every day and sat somewhere in the room in a seat just like the seats all the other learners sat in. I did not say good morning, or how are you today, or do you have any questions, or tell jokes, or talk about football games, or anything else to lighten things up. I did not pretend to be happy if I was not, or invest Parent and Child ego state energy trying to make the course fun.
If the class was in a room with movable desks, the desks would be rearranged around the walls of the room in a circle classroom layout. The De-Gamer would be placed on a desk in the center of the room, and whomever got selected as the last leader of the moment would walk to the center of the room and twirl the De-Gamer to randomly select the new leader of the moment. Whomever got pointed out would then start the discussion. If the room was a larger amphitheater room with fixed seats I would sit in one of the seats somewhere in the room and spin the De-Gamer myself to select the leader of the moment making sure nearby learners could see the number the spinner landed on was the number that was announced to the whole group, proving I did not play Games with this. Each leaner had a permanent number for the selection process. I would boom out the selected number to make sure everyone heard it (we had one amphitheater room in our new business building that could hold about 100 students), and then it was off to the races for some exhilarating sink or swim dialectical case method learning for fifty minutes.
I had a cowbell I would clang if I saw anyone disrupting the proceedings during a discussion. I always waited until all the other learners were in their seats before I walked in the room, which got very quiet. I said nothing until after I sat down in a seat somewhere in the room. If the De-Gamer randomly selected me I would lay out the case just like any other learner would have if selected. If I thought learners had covered the relevant points of the case and had generally comprehended the case and had developed good consensual answers I would say nothing for the whole fifty minutes, except for saying Number 30, or whatever was the number the De-Gamer randomly selected, to kick things off in an amphitheater room. I would walk out of the room just like everyone else at the end of the fifty minutes doing a little pastiming with other learners in the process as we walked out.
We would discuss the next case in the book in the next meeting using the same format day after day most of the time. If I thought learners had not covered the relevant points and learned what was generally going on in the states of affairs of the case in a session, I would do my best to fill the group in on what I thought they should have learned if they missed something, and I would try to straighten them out where I thought they were technically wrong or inappropriate, if no other learner in the group was able to.
In general learners probably did about eighty percent of the talking in my courses. Learners who have done a good job of learning something and have done a good job of telling a learning group about it feel discounted if the teacher for no good reason repeats what they have already taught the class, stealing their thunder to rip off plastic strokes for him or herself playing GYWP.
I would check the roll by looking at the seating chart. Each learner was furnished a copy of the seating chart and had to make sure they were sitting between the to students the chart said they were. I paid attention to what every learner said and did in the course and did my best to fairly grade their performance as excellent, good, average, poor, or failing, relative to the performance of all learners in the course. About eighty percent of the final grade was based on class participation and about twenty percent was based on case write-ups.
I had very few complaints told to me about the grades I assigned, but according to Pick-A-Prof.com, an on-line service for students created by enterprising students at the University of Texas in about 2000, I had one of the lowest grade point averages in the Georgia Southern business school and at Georgia Southern in general, assigning about ten percent A’s. Somehow those enterprising UT students figured out how to download the course grades professors assigned at colleges and universities in states that had open records laws, as Georgia did, and make them available for students and everyone else to see in broad daylight on the website they created, Pick-a-Prof.com, thereby De-Gaming a lot of grade inflation Games in a lot of colleges and universities.
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Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA was the senior professor at Georgia Southern University the academic year he retired, 2004-2005. For a full listing of his credentials see “RJS Ancestry and Scripting” and “RJS Athletic, Business, and Academic Vita” by clicking on their prompts in the menu of the Effective Learning Report at the top of this blog page.
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