Support or spoon feeding? Research skills training for first year marketing students in a large class

This paper describes the work done by the authors to develop and evaluate a new worksheet and quiz assessment developed to explicitly teach the skills required by marketing students to complete their studies and to be successful professional marketers. While concerns were raised in the teaching faculty that such interventions might amount to spoon feeding, the authors felt that there was sufficient evidence to suggest that such an activity was an effective learning support, especially in such a large first year class. Student survey results indicate that for many students the activity successfully taught a repeatable process of how to find information that would be helpful for current and future research and assignment needs. The authors conclude that the activity was a success and will deploy it again with students, although as an optional rather than mandatory activity.