Basic skills and global competencies for business major graduates

A task of achieving academic success by business students becomes of paramount importance in our times, as globalization puts high pressures on our national priorities in education and workforce training. The projected shortage of skilled workers for the global economy elevates concerns about our economic growth and competitiveness in the world. This article is built upon research (Weisblat, 2010) that had achieved two objectives. First, through the reviewed literature, basic skills and global competencies required from business major graduates in the global economy were identified. Second, perspectives of college educators and business leaders on the required skills and competencies were captured. The researchers compared these perspectives in order to answer the question of whether business schools are successful in producing “knowledge workers” (Drucker, 1996) for the global economy. This purpose was achieved by utilizing a grounded theory outlined by Charmaz (2006).Such comparison of educators’ and business leaders’ views shed light on the issues of effectiveness of business education and employers’ satisfaction with the business graduates’ academic preparation. The study revealed significant differences in educators’ and employers’ understanding of what skills make business graduates competitive in the 21st century, and what skills, accordingly, should educators teach. Implications for practice were recognized, based on the findings of this study, including the need for extensive collaboration and greater input from business leaders into the design of curriculum that fits the rapidly evolving global economy

Becoming a multicultural advocate: A grounded theory study

School districts and universities are being asked to implement multicultural materials into their curriculum and multicultural practices into their schools. In order to accomplish this effectively, more understanding of the process of becoming a multicultural advocate is needed. The purpose of this study was to explore, through the perceptions of teachers and administrators in a Midwestern public school district, the process of becoming a multicultural advocate. A grounded theory methodology was used in order to establish a theory of becoming a multicultural advocate. The theory states that the context of environment encapsulates all of the causal conditions (personality, family, relationships, life experience, knowledge, beliefs, personality), intervening conditions (barriers), action/interaction strategies (interventions, assimilation), and consequences (behavior) of the phenomenon of multicultural advocacy. Therefore, before multicultural advocacy can take place, the environment must be made conducive to multicultural advocacy. Specific actions and strategies were suggested by the informants and an intervention process was proposed. The process highlights the continued participation of the informants in the persistence of identifying key environmental concepts that need to be transformed and in utilizing the informants\u27 leadership to motivate others to move toward becoming multicultural advocates

Building Intrapersonal Competencies in the First-Year Experience: Utilizing Random Forest, Cluster Analysis, and Linear Regression to Identify Students’ Strengths and Opportunities for Institutional Improvement

Leveraging research that illustrates the importance of intrapersonal competency cultivation and its correlation with institutional performance indicators of student success such as end-of-term cumulative GPA, persistence, and academic probation, our team set out to conduct an analysis on the effectiveness of a 1-unit credit/no-credit first-semester, first-year student seminar course. The course was designed to cultivate specific intrapersonal competency gains using a pre- and post-assessment design. Using a supervised Random Forest method and cluster analysis, the team expected to find unique differences in intrapersonal competency pre-, matched pre- and post-, and post-assessment inventory scores in a way where course design improvements could be made for specific student identities and their intersections. This manuscript focuses on the post-assessment analysis only, where the team found identifiable differences in small populations of identity groups. As such, this methodology asserts a plausible way to identify equity gaps when specific underrepresented identities are small in number and also explains how intrapersonal competencies can be better cultivated by the university for those underserved students