Qualitative Findings Regarding Pedagogical Experiments In Business Classes Performed In Two Colleges To Improve Critical Thinking Skills Of The Participating Students
Frank DeSimone, Department of Business Administration, Wagner College, Staten Island, NY
John Buzza, Center for Entrepreneurship, Monmouth University, Long Branch, NJ

ABSTRACT
The motivation for this paper comes from need, need for our students to learn not only subject matter through traditional methods in a classroom, but foundational learning through experiences obtained directly in the workplace. The terminology used today for this student experience is referred to as experiential learning. This experiential learning comes in two forms, either (1) learning by yourself or (2) through experiential education (learning through programs established by others). You can kindly refer to learning by yourself as “nature’s way of learning” as it occurs as a direct participation in the life cycle. However experiential education can be defined more succinctly as a structured approach, using experiences and the direction of others to create the learning curve.
The issue at hand is simple - does participatory (experiential) education create critical thinkers among our students and make them more aware of and able to more easily solve the problem(s) at hand? Our diligence has focused on two distinctly different courses in two different semesters (fall 2011 and spring 2012) in two different business disciplines (business marketing and entrepreneurship) at two distinctly different universities (Wagner College and Monmouth University) with one similar problem, is there a significant benefit to experiential learning over traditional classroom pedagogy?
Our findings are profound in the respect that both the participating subjects (students) and the participating businesses achieved significant benefits when this