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Course integration: What impact on student grades? Working paper series--02-11

Abstract

Universities are implementing a number of strategies designed to help students develop an integrated view of a business. Faculty and students are each interested in the impact these integration strategies have on student grades. This paper describes one school's experiment in curriculum integration and the impact it has had on student grades comparing a set of courses taken individually versus the same courses taken as an integrated block. The results indicate that grading rigor did not suffer in the block format and that students' grades were more highly correlated between courses in the block format. It is hypothesized that the higher correlation of grades is due to the content integration present in the block courses. That is, if content is more integrated we would expect a student doing well in one of the courses to be more likely to do well in the other courses in the same block. Partial correlation analysis lends support to this hypothesis

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