Recent business competition between Japan and America has sparked an interest in Japanese management methods and their use in the American management environment. Numerous books, articles, and programs have attempted to popularize Japanese management techniques (Ouchi, 1981; Clark, 1979; Arbose, 1980; Kuzela, 1980; Cole, 1980; National Broadcasting Co., Inc., 1980). However, incorporation of these techniques into American management situations has been restricted at times by failing
Summer school is fraught with many learning problems. During an eight week summer session there seems to be very little time for students to truly learn class material, to do independent thinking, to become motivated, to enhance their communication skills, or to feel as if the instructor was treating them as genuine human beings. These learning problems represented unsettling thoughts for me. After teaching summer school for a number of years using a formal lecturing style, I felt it was time to seek out a pedagogy that would add learning enrichment to my classroom. I finally decided to utilize student presentations of endof-chapter questions as my major teaching technique. I hoped this would serve to make students accountable for disseminating technically correct information from each chapter, to motivate and help them interpret this information, and to motivate and engage them in some sort of integrative discussion about this information. Furthermore, I felt that the use of this approach could be grounded in motivational assumptions about students and in a theory or theories of learning. Let’s begin with the elaboration of what the end-of-chapter questions pedagogy represents as an instructional style.
This paper raises issues of interest for those using instruments as part of their teaching. Certainly if the findings of this study were generalizable we could all feel somewhat more sanguine about using instruments and perhaps the model offered in the paper could be debated. Unfortunately this is not the case as a number of serious conceptual and methodological problems flaw the paper. Personally, I am left convinced of the need for more serious validity studies of the instrument we use in class.
