Assessing the Teaching and Achieving of Research Skills

We present a method to empirically analyse the relation between faculty wide intended learning and concomitant achieved learning outcomes. The method is applied to the Master of Science in Business Administration (MSc BA) program of the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) of the University of Groningen. Intended learning is measured from the students' exposure to seven research aspects taught according to course specific learning goals. The achieved learning outcomes are derived from the grades that the FEB professors gave on these research aspects when grading the students' final Master theses. We find that the intended learning of the research aspects in the MSc BA program does not benefit the students with a previous Bachelor of Science background at the FEB. However, external students with no previous FEB background do benefit from such teaching. Because of these plausible results we expect that our method may also be relevant for accreditation committees/managers of other Business Schools. Moreover, the application results may also be interesting for professors who (intend to) teach research skills.