How do You Know Your Classroom Exercise Worked? The Case of The Loki Equipment Exercise

One of the pedagogical tools that management teachers employ in the classroom is the use of experiential exercises (Banning, 2003). Classroom exercises have been argued to be an effective way to provide students with essential experiences to inform their behavioral repertoire when they become practicing managers themselves. However, very often, exercises are presented without empirical evidence that demonstrates their effectiveness in achieving the learning objectives that are intended to meet (Schmidt-Wilk, 2010). This can be problematic as students may not be equipped with the knowledge or skills teachers intend. Very often, exercises that are used have not been supported by empirical evidence. Alternatively, the evidence that is relied upon is only intuitive or anecdotal. In this session, we will introduce a case-based role-play exercise entitled the Loki Equipment Exercise, as a context to demonstrate one way to empirically demonstrate the degree to which exercises meet specified learning objectives. In doing so, our session is intended to answer the following question: "How do you know that your experiential exercise worked?” In what follows, we introduce the Loki Equipment Exercise and its theoretical background, list the exercises learning objectives, and then discuss how we teach and debrief the exercise. We then describe how we have empirically demonstrated the exercise’s effectiveness. We conclude with a description of our proposed session format.