The Economics Network

Improving economics teaching and learning for over 20 years

An evaluation of the challenges MBA students encounter in acquiring and applying threshold concepts in Economics

An Economics Network funded project, 2006-7

Project leaders: Dr Keith Gray, Ms Peri Yavash
Contacts: k.gray@coventry.ac.uk, p.yavash@coventry.ac.uk

The main purpose of this project is to enhance the acquisition and the application of threshold concepts in Economics by non-specialist postgraduate students. It is recognised that one aspect of threshold concepts is their troublesome nature (Meyer and Land, 2003). However, they may pose additional challenges for postgraduate students with a non-Economics background, but with commercial experience.

The project has a series of related objectives. These are to:

  • Evaluate MBA student's perception of the role and usefulness of economics to management decision making and evaluate how this changes through the implementation of embedding strategies
  • Examine the implications of the research findings for the wider postgraduate community within the Business Faculty where students also take a compulsory diet of economics, e.g. MA Financial Management.
  • Assess the implications for MBA course design, innovation and resourcing.
  • Extend the existing FDTL5 project on Threshold concepts (of which Coventry is a partner) by examining the key differences between the experiences of undergraduate and postgraduate students in acquiring and applying threshold concepts in economics

Output: Powerpoint Presentation from DEE 2007 conference
Output: Project Final Report (Word document)