Evaluation

At the end of the year, it is a good practice to stop and evaluate our performance before we head into the New Year. Evaluation allows us to be able to know where we want to go in the future and to learn from past mistakes. Evaluation, the highest step in critical thinking, thus allows us to have vision of the future and knowledge of the past. Having these qualities, provides us with inner clarity.

Students often think like this "But I don't want to make any mistakes, I want my performance to be perfect." Thus, they undervalue the function of evaluation. In reality, without errors there can be real understanding of any subject. After all, what does it value a student to retake a subject they already understand? Real learning comes with the difficult realization that knowledge must be acquired.

Then when we look back, we can evaluate our performance before moving forward to the future. This makes real learning possible.

KB

Stress Reduction - A new approach

This fall, I have spent a good deal of time meditating and trying to stay in the moment. This is not new for me; I was introduced to mindfulness meditation by my psychologist in Winnipeg. I had made a stab at it, and found it very difficult. My mind wandered all over the place and although I'd read the book "Wherever you are, there you are" by Jon Kabat-Zinn; it didn't make it easier for me to meditate.

Below I have a place where you can buy Kabat-Zinn's meditations if you are interested:

http://www.nightingale.com/prod_detail.aspx?product=Mindfulness_Meditation&promo=intgooga430&ORG=intgooga430&gclid=COHToKLx1KwCFUKo4AodMVk-rw

These are the meditations I use now and I find them helpful. Okay, what is changed? Why did I try it again? Well, I wanted to restore balance to my life & I heard that through these simple exercises I could do that very thing. I read Jack Kornfield who said: "Training with the breath is a bit like training a small puppy" (Meditation for Beginners, 21). So, I'm finding that I'm staying in the here and now more and feeling less distracted.

That's me for today.

KB

English vs. American vs. Canadian spelling

I was raised and educated in Canada. When it came to spelling and grammar, sometimes we did it the English way and sometimes we did it the American way. In fact, the word "spell" is a perfect example of this conundrum. My Oxford Dictionary assures me that "spelt" is the past tense of "spell" as does my copy of "Advanced Grammar in Use". To further complicate the matter, my Canadian grammar books do not list "spell" as an irregular verb. Thus, I should spell the past tense of spell, spelled.

Readers of this blog should be aware that at the University of Leicester, we use English spelling throughout our work. Thus, you should be aware of these differences:

Can-American/English
tire/tyre
traveled/travelled
colour/color/colour
aluminum/aluminium
cancelled/canceled/cancelled
judgment/judgement
civilization civilisation/civilization
mold/mould
licorice/liquorice
dreamed dreamt
cheque/check cheque
connection/connexion
favorite/favourite

jewelry/jewellery
archeology/archaelogy
program/programme
fetus/foetus
realize/realise

These, of course, are not the only examples. Use your Oxford/English Dictionary for more examples.

KB

Grammar Bytes: Punctuation

Gower, as cited by Davidson, refers to the dash as "seductive" (Davidson, George. How to Punctuate. London: Penguin Bks., 155.) First, you need to understand the difference between the dash and the hyphen. A hyphen is the length of one key stroke. For example, the word half-life.

A dash, on the other hand, is the length of two hyphens or keystrokes like this: "The ceremony this year in New York to mark the anniversary of 9/11 -- a ceremony that was held for the first time in the impressive newly-dedicated memorial -- went on over many hours. Note that the information inside the brackets, parenthetical modifiers, explain or add new information to the already existing sentence. (Some computer programmes turn two dashes into the long dash automatically.)

Frequently, the reason for the use of the dash is because the sentence already contains internal punctuation. See this example from The Ready Reference Handbook: "These days the volume of business communications -- from customers and suppliers, from supervisors, colleagues and staff -- has mushroomed" (Dodds & Jewinski, 277). The dash here allows the reader to sort the details of the sentence out easily. However, the dash should not -- as is frequently the case in student reports, assignments and exams -- be used when the comma is the more obvious choice.

A dash is used first and foremost for emphasis. For example: "To keep my dog Scout quiet, I must use consistency and discipline -- discipline each and every day."

The second use of the dash, as noted above is to set off parenthetical material. Do this when you find the use of more commas is confusing as noted earlier in the blog.

The third use of the dash, noted in this posting, is to display lists. Please note that a colon is the more formal way of introducing a list. This makes a colon the usual choice in an academic paper. Example: "Our basement is packed with numerous items from our last six moves -- books that could not find a home upstairs, chairs and desks that are too large for our home, more kitchen equipment than our present house can't accommodate and bits and bobs that have never been sorted from one move to the next."

A fourth use of the dash is to show faltering speech, incomplete sentences or a narrative insertion. Examples:
"I can't do it --- I really can't do it -- please, don't make me," he stuttered.
(faltering speech)

"Please stop --."
"I say --."
(Incomplete sentences that are cut off by further action in the dialogue.)

"Sir" -- he raised his hands to his watering eyes -- "Surely, you can find it in your heart to be merciful."
(Narrative insertion)

Dashes need to be used with caution in academic work. Don't, as stated earlier, use them to substitute for commas. Happy writing.

KB

References

Davidson, George. How to Punctuate. London: Penguin Books, 2005.

Dodds, Jack and Judi Jewinski. The Ready Reference Book: Canadian Edition. Toronto: Prentice Hall, 1998.

Getting through your MBA/MSc : Keys to Motivation

How do you maintain motivation in order to get you through your MBA/MSc? Let's look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The page below shows numerous visual representations of this hierarchy.

(http://www.google.ca/search?q=Maslow%27s+hierarchy+of+needs&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=UEU&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=ivnsb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=SyduTtDYIKbK0AHS0cHVBA&ved=0CFoQsAQ&biw=1094&bih=550)

A cursory examination of these various visual attempts to illustrate Maslow's principles establishes that self-actualization exists near or at the highest level of this hierarchy needs. (Please note this is not an affirmation of any of the correctness of any of these visual representations, simply that many visual representations of Maslow's hierarchy exist.)

Educators have noted that students need to use their school work, not be able to have a career and money, but strong achievers use their school work to tie into the goals of self esteem and self affirmation. Bob Poston's article, "An Exercise in Personal Exploration: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" describes Maslow's hierarchy of needs from the lowest to the highest needs in this manner:
1. Physiological Needs
2. Safety Needs
3. Belonging and Love Needs
4. Esteem Needs (Google Scholar, http://tabacco.blog-city.co/maslows_hierarchy_of_needs__physiological_level_1_to_selfact.htm, 08/15/2011)

Thus Maslow asserts that students are more motivated if what they are learning helps them establish and strengthen what we call the higher needs, that is esteem. Self esteem reinforces feelings of self worth and happiness.

For adult learners in Distance Education to remain motivated can be difficult. The adult learner often feels alone in the educational process. They seem to have no cohort and certainly have no actual physical classroom. Thus, students without sufficient discipline and inner motivation can find themselves adrift without the familiar world of the classroom they knew elsewhere. What do we do to remedy this?

At the University of Leicester, we try and duplicate the classroom environment by encouraging students to stay connected with their fellow students and module tutors through Blackboard, through encouraging them to attend summer school and by providing ways to remain in contact through the internet with skills and dissertation tutors. Students need to use these tools if they find themselves drifting off course and cannot connect stay on course with their module assignments and examinations. Valuable advise can be helpful to stay on track throughout the programme.

To summarize, the way I see it is that two qualities are essential for success. One is to remain firmly focused on the prize, that is the MBA itself. The second quality is, as I've suggested in this blog already, is to feel a sense of success and accomplishment as you make your way through each and every assignment and exam. Mark your successes in some way. Stay aware of how achievement of these goals will bring the desired result, the MBA. Keep your head in the game. This is how students before have completed this programme and how you will do the same thing.

KB

Leicester Summer School 2011

Well, I've been home from Summer School in the UK for almost two weeks now. I wanted to extend my greetings to all of the students who visited me during the week of July 25-29th . I learned a great deal from every one of you. I'm hoping to make the blog more exciting and more interactive during the next year. I was very chuffed to find out how many people actually read this blog and how many of the blog users try my approaches to: reading, studying, learning, stress and organizing work.

This merely encourages me to try and get more imaginative with the blog. I'm glad people are really reading it because I want this blog to have a little more than information. It is, to a great extent, interactive. I like when people write about questions. So, for the coming year - good luck - and for those who are leaving us double good luck - the job climate requires that students present more than a smile a briefcase these days.

Studying, reading and memory: Creating a Study Schedule that Works

Last week at Summer School 2011, I had a lot of students come to me to ask about improving their study techniques so that they would increase their marks on their exams. So, this posting will be about how you can increase memory retention while reading over module textbooks and other materials and improve your performance. Planning and understanding a little bit about how memory and the mind work help a great deal in this regard. Why? Let's look the mind and memory.

To the left is a beautiful drawing of the brain by Christopher Wren. What I find interesting about this is that Wren, who built St. Paul's Cathedral with all of its architectural complexities, was interested in domed structures at the micro level as well as structures at the macro level. Similar pictures of the brain exist in the drawings of Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. Studying and drawing the structures of the body has been the standard method for hundreds of years in Western culture of understanding the dynamics of line drawing - particularly depth and proportion. We've been intrigued by these body structures for centuries and we understand some of them better than others. The brain still mystifies us in many ways, but we do have some pretty good understanding of the way memory works. We can use this understanding to improve our retention of materials for exams.

I have emphasized with many of my students the importance of examining the organizational structure of your textbook and connecting it to previously learned knowledge as a way to help retain information for your examinations. However, understanding how the brain itself works can help students realize more effective study strategies. Trying to improve memory function in learning is not a new idea. According to Walker and Schonwetter, mnemonics, or using acronyms, codes or made-up sentences to remember long pieces of oral or written work was developed by the classical Greeks (Success Secrets of University Students 2003: 157.) One example is the sentence: Richard Of York Goes Back In Vain - a nonsense sentence that is formed with words beginning with the first letter of each colour in the visible electromagnetic spectrum. It is used to remember the colours of the spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. The nonsense sentence is much easier for your brain to remember than a random collection of colours.

Another example is SQ3R...Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review. How and why does this study cycle work? To begin with, the technique my father vigorously adhered to - long and exhaustive study sessions leading up to a test - don't really improve the memory at all! In fact, if you study for eight hours at one stretch before your test - instead of, for example, breaking that time down into one hour cycles with 1/2 hour breaks between sessions - you will retain less knowledge than if you carefully planned to Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review. Why?

Memory is broken up into long term and short term memory. Obviously, when you first encounter information from a text, it will only go into your short term memory. A long pre-exam session over an 8 hour stretch cannot and will not allow that information to be transferred to long term memory. However, the SQ3R cycle repeated several times in one day and preferably over many days and weeks, will lead to the transference of information from short term memory to long term memory.

Let's examine this cycle:

Survey - Read the material over completely. Remember, these exams are comprehensive. Do not assume you know what will be on your exam. Read everything.
Question - Develop key questions about the material.
Read - Find the answers to the questions you have developed.
Recite - Go over the material, reciting it to make sure you understand what you've learned.
Review - Go over all the material again.
Take a 1/2 hour break!!!!!

This study cycle should take you one hour. If you can't review one chapter in one hour, break the chapters down as required. After a break, you can return to your studying again. This technique has many advantages - especially for many MBA/MSc students. Planning ahead, one hour of study time per day is not a waste of time as students so often believe. In fact, these short sessions are very helpful to memory retention and learning. Additionally, students can and should try and tie the information they are learning to previously learned knowledge.

Note: SQ3R was originally developed by Francis Pleasant Robinson in his 1970 book Effective Learning.

Writing Resources: A list and suggestions

Hi, I've made a list of writing resources to help students who need to strengthen their writing. One of the obstacles some students encounter in our programme is a lack of sophistication in their writing. In previous posts, I've spoken about the need to make writing critical and how to use Bloom's Taxonomy. This is different from the sophistication of your sentence and paragraph structures and developing a good argument.

To begin with, I recommend a sophisticated grammar book. I suggest the following:

Hewings, Martin, 2005. Advanced Grammar in Use, 2nd ed. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Buy the edition with the answers and the CD Rom with the supplemental exercises if possible.

Additionally, every student should have a good dictionary and thesaurus. Oxford publishes both these tools. A thesaurus helps build vocabulary and word by suggesting different words with different shades of meaning. Accuracy in language use is very important as well. This is why you should use a good comprehensive dictionary with English spellings. After all, University of Leicester is an English university and English spelling is the standard here. I use the Oxford Concise which I find larger and more accurate than smaller, cheaper dictionaries.

In terms of writing, I suggest the following books as complete guides to proper essay and assignment writing:

Bailey, Stephen, 2006. Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students, 2nd ed. London : Routledge.

Jordan, R. R., 1999. Academic Writing Course: Study Skills in English, 3rd ed. Harlow : Pearson Educational Limited.

I hope these resources are useful to students with writing issues.

KB

How to Contact a Dissertation Tutor

To Post Queries on the Support Forum

Please go to Blackboard. Log into ‘Dissertation’ on the left hand side of the screen. You should see a grey menu bar select ‘Support Forums’. Click on ‘Access the Support Forums’. Select the relevant subject area from those listed (Management of Information Systems). Once there click on ‘Create a Thread’. You can then post your query and submit it.

To Book a Telephone Appointment with the Dissertation Tutor

Please go to Blackboard log into ‘Dissertation’. On the left hand side of the screen you should see a grey menu bar. Select ‘Book a Meeting’ click on 2011 Meetings. Now select a month that you wish to book the meeting complete and submit the form.

These are the standard instructions, given to me by the office, are the standard instructions for helping you find dissertation tutor information on blackboard.

KB

Sentences and full stops

What is a sentence? Many grammar writers, such as George Davidson (How to Punctuate, Penguin Bks) , define a sentence as a complete thought. For example:

Tuppence went to garden, selected a patch in the garden and dug up the tulips.
However, as Davidson points out a sentence like this one can be written as three thoughts.

Tuppence went to the garden. She selected a patch in the garden. She dug up the tulips.

The first sentence, about my dog Tuppence (who has not been digging up tulips in my garden), joins together several ideas using a comma and a coordinate conjunction "and". This makes reading this sentence smoother. However, there might be circumstances in which we might want to emphasize the repetition of an action for artistic effect. For example:

Tuppence went to the garden. She heard a black squirrel chatting in the pine trees. She barked again and again. When KB heard this, she rushed outside immediately.

This sentence (which Tuppence wants you to know is the truth) expresses the annoying and repetitive actions of Tuppence, the dog when she sees squirrels.

I define a sentence as a complete thought that use a subject and a verb. The subject, as you can see can be Tuppence (a noun) or she (a pronoun). Pronouns take the place of nouns in sentences when we already know the subject of the of the sentence. For example, if we repeated the subject "Tuppence" in all three sentences instead of the pronoun "she", the repetition would be very annoying.

A full stop or period exists at the end of complete thoughts to express complete ideas. A sentence with commas should join together ideas with the same subject.

Thus:

Tuppence went to the garden, heard a black squirrel chatting in the pine trees and barked again and again. When KB heard this, she rushed outside immediately.

Notice that I have joined only the first three sentences. All these sentences have the same subject, Tuppence.

Next week, I shall discuss semi colons and their use.

KB

Plagiarism vs. Poor Scholarship

Hi, this post comes around periodically because it is an ongoing problem for some students. I'm aware that many of the students do understand about plagiarism. For those students, please bear with me because these are issues that come up frequently. This is the reason for this posting.

This is is a link to University of Leicester's page on plagiarism:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/sd/ld/resources/study/plagiarism-tutorial

The following is a link to a useful site at the Indiana University Bloomington that has a useful questionnaire for students who are uncertain about plagiarism:

https://www.indiana.edu/~tedfrick/plagiarism/

To clarify, all students at the University of Leicester should be aware of the university's policy with regard to plagiarism. Once you have read and understood this policy, that may be enough information for some students. However, this is not the case for all students.

Which students are at the most risk of plagiarism or poor scholarship? I have created a list below of conditions that indicate a student is in danger of plagiarism and/or poor scholarship:

1. Students who are lost and use online sources, without clear references, such as this one to help yourself:
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html

This is a poor source to use if you want to understand Bloom's Taxonomy. Notice that there are advertisements here. Notice as well that the taxonomy itself is not labeled. There are many similar websites on, for example, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Research for your research papers should come from reliable textbooks, the University of Leicester's digital library and some online sources which are reliable. Sadly, Wikipedia cannot be numbered among these sources at the present time because it contains many mistakes and is not written by scholars.

Look at this source for doing research on the Civil War:
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/warweb.html

Notice that this source points the way to reliable primary (first hand) and secondary sources on the Civil War. This source is updated regularly. Other such sources would include university webpages or webpages such as the Medline.

Students often don't realize good research takes time. You need to allow yourself to have this time to do the kind of research that is expected in quality work.

2. Students who have difficulty writing.

When students can't write properly, they often use the words of others. There are resources such as:

Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students by Stephen Bailey

to assist students who have difficulty in putting together a good logical argument. Additionally, the University of Leicester offers courses for students who have difficulties with English. Sometime, taking such a programme can make getting your degree easier and is a worthwhile investment.

Finally, I would add that students must understand that rephrasing the words of another author and not providing citations is a big problem. All ideas and concepts stemming from the work of others must be cited.

Students should be aware that if their work is found to be plagiarized, they won't get a second opportunity to submit it. This is why students who are told that their work has failed due to poor scholarship must be careful. They will be allowed to resubmit their work. However, their work will be scrutinized carefully for plagiarism. Additionally, module tutors/markers will expect that they have fixed this problem in the redraft of their assignment.

I hope that this is clear to all students.

KB

Thank you to all students

Dear Students:

I was very touched by the number of responses when I was forced to go off line for a while earlier this year. As you may have noticed, there have been a number of blog postings since then. The responses of my students has made me realize that this blog is being read. As we go into summer, I'm going to try and include blogs on grammar. I had considered dropping these blog postings but find that they are very useful for most students.

Thank you again. Every posting is appreciated.

KB

Assignment Questions based on Quoted Sources

In the past month, I've noticed that some students have problems with assignments that use quoted sources on a given subject[Finance, Accounting, OB] to sponsor discussion. To help you learn to approach questions that use quotations, I want to begin with a simple example from literature.

Example Question:

Henry James argued in his forward to "The Aspern Papers" that he wanted "to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity." (1888). Discuss.

What is implied here by "discuss"? As I've mentioned in previous posts, the objective of most academic work is to develop critical thinking. In the context of this question, critical thinking means discussion of this point. So, when you examine "The Aspern Papers", is the author brief and lucid. These words conveyed something different for 19th century readers than they do in the present. We, as the media constantly reminds us, live in the age of email and phone texts, blogs, Twitter and Facebook. The Aspern Papers, by comparison with these brief commications, is a book of endless emotional complications and complex language. It is roughly 100 pages of dense text. By our standards, this isn't brief. If you were writing about this question, for an assignment, the discussion would involve a lively exchange of information which would highlight both sides of the debate with fairness and clarity.

When longer quotations are involved, the first challenge facing the student is comprehension. What does the quotation mean? An example of a longer quotation, from Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991:

"The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s."

Quotations such as these require more investigation. Before writing your paper, it's important when you're given lengthy and complicated quotations, that you spend time understanding them. Suggestions by the module tutor, to look at a particular source or writer to assist understanding, should be taken seriously and these other writers will probably be included in your assignment and bibliography. When you have a complex quotation, such as the one above, the temptation is to by-pass it and begin writing your paper without this analysis. This is a serious mistake. Quotations must be dissected and clearly understood before proceeding with discussion and debate. Thus, you can see, these long quotations are used as a method to inspire debate and discussion in your assignments. Understanding them is part and parcel of being a graduate student.

Until next time,

KB

Saving time at the Beginning of Assignments

A student asked me how he could save time in doing his assignments. This the advice I gave for the first stages of work on an assignment topic.

"The first thing most students don't understand is the first stage in doing an assignment isn't information gathering. In the first stage of an assignment, you reflect on what you are being asked to do and the materials you already have at hand to do the assignment. Consider this:

1. The tutor will expect that you have read the information in the module text on the assigned topic. It will also help you later if you go over the module text. Good marks on your final exams is a result of going over study information several times. (SQ3R)
2. You should understand all the terminology the tutor uses any given assignment. You should look up terms you don't understand in your module text. The module text was chosen for a reason. The focus and definitions in a text usually fit with the way the tutor also defines any terminology in a given assignment.
3. Read your module text can help you to understand the question, first. Do not go online and read a lot of information on the internet that may or may not be correct.
4. If you spend your time wisely at the beginning of an assignment, defining the perimeters of the question you can save time later by not going off topic later.
5. Discussion on Blackboard is also important here.

Okay, so before writing a word, understand what is really required of you. To do this, you can use a variety of tools:
1. Your mind and your imagination.
2. Your module text.
3. Map minds or other mapping tools.
4. Blackboard (bb)

You need to look at the subject of an assignment clearly and understand what it means.

KB

Studying: SQ3R

Aside from telling students who are studying that they should use distributed practice, I tell them to use SQ3R as their studying method. SQ3R stands for: survey, question, read, recite and review.

1. Survey - Read the material through that you are studying. Think about what it means.

2. Question - Formulate questions about the materials that you need to answer before the exam.

3. Read - When you are reading, find the answers to the questions above.

4. Recite - Cover over the material you are studying, recite it from memory.

5. Review - Go back to the material and see what you have missed.

This cycle should take no longer than 45 min. - 1 hour. You should, following distributed practice, then take an extended break. If you want to remember what you're studying, you are better to organize several short study periods over a week in which you study. The reason that cramming is not efficient is because the objective of studying is to get the information from your short-term memory into your long-term memory. This can't be accomplished by cramming.

What I'm saying here is, use SQ3R as your overall study strategy. If you want to take a last minute look at your textbook to review it, that's not a problem. The important thing you need to remember is that you should go into the exam room, calm and confident. That last minute look is fine, as long as you have the backlog of information in your memory from repeated study and consistent review. I hope this has been helpful.

KB

A Hiatus for this Blog until March 31, 2011

Hi, for the last few months, I've been struggling very hard to write these posts. The main reason has to do with a serious problem with my back. This issue has been dealt with by major spinal surgery two weeks ago. However, I'm still struggling just to keep up with my emails from all my students. The operation, which I wish to say was 100% successful, means that I need to spend more time taking care of myself so that I can heal. That is, I need to do therapeutic exercises in a warm pool every week to strengthen my back as well as gentle walking. In order to facilitate my healing, I'm taking some time off this blog so that I can focus on healing. As I say, I'm not taking any time off my teaching obligations. When I come back to write this blog, I was hoping that students might post suggestions for posts and topics of interest. I will endeavour to help students with these requests in every way possible. As usual, you can contact me through my email at the University of Leicester if you have any urgent inquires before March 31st.

KB

Using critical thinking to make winning assignments

Okay, this week I want to using critical thinking to make winning assignments. Let's look at a sample question:

SAMPLE ASSIGNMENT QUESTION
How can theories of motivation help us to motivate employees at a lower levels of the organization? (Use2 sources, 3,500 words, Double spaced, New Roman 12 pt font)

First, we need to understand what motivation theories we are going to discuss. Looking at our textbook, we find information on these theories:
a) Maslow's hierarchy of needs
b) Herzberg's two-factor theory
c) Expectancy theory

We are not going to go through each theory in detail. However, we will briefly look at how you might take ideas from Maslow (the hierarchy of needs) to begin to frame a discussion of motivation and low-level employees in an organization. You can follow the same pattern with any of the other motivational theories when you write out an assignment question.

In this assignment, the module tutor wants to read about your analysis and your ideas, not ideas you've found on the internet. Second hand opinions found in discussions on Maslow on the internet may look slickly written when you are having difficulty formulating your own opinions, but they are unoriginal and show that you haven't thought about the question deeply. The questions, such as the one above, are written so that you can draw on your own experience to back up arguments on motivational theory.

To begin the process of thinking deeply on this question, you should read your OB text to find the motivational theories you're going to use in your discussion. This will help you formulate ideas about how, to give one example, Maslow's theories could be used to motivate low-level employees in an organization.

Let's consider Maslow. Maslow develops a hierarchy of human needs beginning with simple needs such as food and shelter. At this level of the hierarchy, we can see that financial remuneration allows low-level employees in an organization to pay for their rent, food and other basic needs. Moving to the highest level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, self-actualization, we have to ask how the organization inspires low-level employees to (for example) get more education. Education and training helps employees to move from lower-level jobs to higher-level jobs. In writing about this, you need to consider how the organization might encourage employees to receive more education and training (or if this doesn't really happen).

I mentioned earlier that you are supposed to use critical thinking to back up your arguments. Using the example of Maslow's hierarchy of needs again, let's look at how you can structure a paragraph to make a critical argument that fulfills the needs of the topic.

Outline of a Paragraph Discussing the Use of Motivational Techniques on Low-level Employees in An Organization

Sentence 1 (Topic Sentence with Main Discussion Point) - Employees can satisfy the need for food and shelter, a basic need according to Maslow
Sentence 2 (Use of evidence to back up or disagree with the main point) - In Organization X (a fast food restaurant), the employees are all part-time and the salary could not be used to pay for their food and shelter
Sentence 3 (Analysis) - Because it is a part-time job, it is often difficult to get employees to come in for extra shifts because the job is not used to support them or pay for their rent.
Sentence 4 (More analysis) - When you were a manager at Organization X, you had difficulty filling all the shifts and found employees quit with little or no warning. This seemed to be because employees were not motivated at the most basic level to work for Organization X.

The question asks you to use 2 sources. Don't use the internet for this research. The University of Leicester has a Digital Library with good source materials that will help back up your arguments. Databases such as Business Source Premiere, JSTOR, Emerald Online and many others can assist you to find the kind of resources that your module tutors will expect to see cited within your assignments.

Until next time,

KB

Writing Around a Question on an Exam

In my posting of September 12, 2010 on exams, I mentioned that students "write around" a question on an exam. A student asked me in October for an example. This posting is an explanation of writing around the question.

Let's say that an exam asks you "to discuss how you would use motivation theory to inspire low-level employees in an organization." Furthermore, the question tells you that you will get 50% for writing on motivation theories or approaches and 50% for applying them to an explanation of how you will motivate low-level employees. This is a perfect scenario for a student, who is confused, to write around the question.

When a student writes around a question, there are usually two reasons. The first is, naturally that the student actually knows nothing about motivational theory. So, for their exam they write about motivating low-level employees, giving a lot of information, but don't relate it directly to any specific theory or approach. This means that the marker is faced with a lot of irrelevant information that is not directly related to theory. A student giving this response could not really pass. As far as the marker is concerned, the student has given no proof that they know any motivational theories as they have given no examples. In fact, the student may know motivational theories but may not understand that they should write specifically about them. Sadly, a marker cannot grade a student for anything but what they've written.

The second student understands all the theories but has no idea how to use them to discuss motivating actual employees. They give you a lot of information on the theories, but don't relate them to any actual example of how to motivate low-level employees. This student may pass, depending on whether or not they may have added any details that seem to be about motivating low-level employees, but they won't do well. If students want more information, I would be happy to write more on this subject in a future posting.

KB