Management Sciences lecturer Ada Hurst and her co-authors Tiffany Bayley, an Assistant Professor at the Ivey Business School and David Wheatley, an Assistant Professor at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, were awarded the 2021 Best Research Paper award from the Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education (DSJIE).
The DSJIE is published by the Decision Sciences Institute with the goal of disseminating "significant research relevant to teaching and learning in the decision sciences". The DSJIE Best Research Paper award is presented annually at the Decision Sciences Institute Annual Conference.
The award-winning paper, "Assessing a novel problem-based learning approach with game elements in a business analytics course" proposes a new teaching approach that engages students in a gamified problem-based learning setting. The authors conducted a controlled study across multiple sections of a business analytics course to evaluate the new pedagogy and to compare it to traditional lecturing. They found that while students were more engaged in the new pedagogy and achieved similar learning outcomes in both settings, they prefer more "passive" content delivery through lectures.