3 Research methodology

3.1 Business Administration program description

International cooperation is a strategy set out from the first days of establishing DTU’s International School. The success of collaboration program with Carnegie Mellon University in IT field has created a great turning point in the training of high quality IT human resources. Thanks to it, DTU has continued to sign with Pennsylvania State University (PSU) to give birth the collaboration program (PSU program) in Business Administration, Tourism, and Finance & Banking. The pedagogical feature of the PSU program is a combination of theoretical and practical knowledge that allows graduates to quickly enter the labor market. In an effort to develop and improve the Bachelor's degree in Management and Services, a survey by PSU on business owners was conducted to find out more about the characteristics that business owners find necessary and important for new employees. Business owners emphasize such factors as problem-solving skills, negotiation skills, critical thinking, presentation skills, writing and personality maturity. All of these elements are integrated into the curriculum, reflected in PBL teaching methods and learning resources.

3.2 PBL implementation of International Business with materials from Penn State University

Faculties of both programs then agreed that (1) the main objective of the course is to prepare students to understand and to work successfully in this global environment, develop in students the awareness of the impact of environmental forces including politics, regulations, legalities, economics, culture, technology and competition, (2) select case studies from books, then ask open questions for each situation, ask students to analyze and find a way to solve that problem when students work in capital enterprises. FDI in Vietnam and (3) using the PBL method in the project group exercise of the subject.

For group assignment, the lecturers present the problem topic to 4-6 student groups. Group are required to solve the addressed problem in three phases: (1) select and analyze the product and/or service, (2) analyze the business environment in Vietnam and chosen foreign country; and (3) deal with issues that arise when working in FDI enterprises in Vietnam or doing business with foreign partners. The duration of the student's group assignments is associated with theoretical knowledge presented in the book.

3.3 Data collection & Research Process

The data used in this study was collected from student scores on the DTU’s archive from 2011 to 2018. Although there are many classes in each year, we arrange them under school year and program including student outcomes without PBL, outcomes with PBL and outcomes when we use PBL with American textbooks in 2014-2015, 2015-2016, 2016-2017 and 2017-2018. Data for the period 2011-2014 only derives from traditional training programs because there were no collaboration programs and no PBL in teaching at the moment. The number of students having academic results archived on DTU’s database is shown in the table below:

Table 1: Number of students archived on DTU’s database

This research focuses on the analysis and comparison of learning outcomes so we proceed in three steps: (1) describe in details of the Business Administration programs currently available at DTU, (2) collect the International Business’ score data of each program for each year and (3) conduct the descriptive statistics the results of the data.

4 Results & Discussion

As of International Business’ outcomes: We have processed the statistics of International Business in the Vietnamese Business Administration program without applying PBL, the percentage of students passing the course is 70% in the period 2011- 2013 and up to 90% in the 2013-2014 school year. This passing ratio greatly depends on the midterm and final exams. Students who want to get high scores often have to listen, take note, and memorize so that they can correctly answer questions in the test.

Statistics of non-PBL classes in Vietnamese Business Administration program are as follows:

Figure 5: Results of non-PBL classes in Vietnamese Business Administration program

Below is the comparison about how International Business course which had been implemented since the 2014-2015 school year differs from traditional teaching method.

Table 2: Comparison of teaching methods

Since 2014-2015, PBL was applied for both Vietnamese and collaborative Business Administration programs. However, the importance weight of the activities in the two programs differs, as shown in the following table:

Table 3: Comparison of importance weight allocation

From here, there have been a big difference between these two programs in passing ratio with descriptive statistics shown as follows:

Figure 6: Results of PBL classes in both programs

Thanks to the adjustment of assessment, the use of modern learning materials and PBL method focusing on group exercises, 100% of PSU Business Administration Collaboration program’s students has passed the course for the 2014 – 2017 period. Meanwhile, the percentage of Vietnamese Business Administration’s students had decreased year after year. This is explained by observing the fact that the Vietnamese program students are still required to heavily memorizing lectures to pass the midterm and final exams as they will be assessed by what they memorized from these lessons in the tests. Additionally, the total importance weight of the midterm and the final test is 70%. If the results of these two tests are low then the final average score will be low for sure. In contrast, PBL teaching methods are primarily based on activities, use of questions, explanations, proofs and coordination. As a consequence, the results of the midterm and final test accounted for only 50% of the whole course, so the learning pressure by memorizing was lowered, and more autonomous activities were added. This is the evidence to positively confirm H1.

As of grade distribution among Internal Business’ outcomes: The traditional program that began using the PBL teaching method since 2014 has improved student achievement over the years as above. In terms of grade, the average score over the years improved gradually over 7.0 in the 2017-2018 school year but the standard deviation has increased clearly. Although the frequency of 7.0-8.5 band score increased but many low grades makes the mean decreases. In the last two school year, 50% of the students have achieved a grade of 7.5-7.85 or higher, significantly higher than the first two years. Compared to the other, 8.3 appear most while the highest score of 9.0 only emerged from the 2015-2016 school year.

Figure 7: Grade distribution of PBL classes in Vietnamese Business Administration Program

In terms of the PSU end-of-course grade distribution, PBL classes have a number of frequency differences over years. The school year of 2016-2017 had the lowest mean (7.73) and the school year 2017-2018 had the highest mean (7.89) which was generally in the range of 7.5-8.0, equivalent “A” band score. The difference between high and low points is very clear, affecting the mean value. The outliers of the 2014-2015 school year fall into 6 and continue for the next 2 years, while 2017-2018 have the left outlier from 2.0 to 6.0. From the school year 2015-2016, by the median, we see that more than 50% of students achieved high scores from 7.6 to 8.3, increasing over 3 years. The frequency of high grade (>8.0) has increased in the last two years, which reached over 20% in this year.

While the highest point in the Vietnamese Business Administration program is 9.2, the PSU program is 9.6. This demonstrates that the use of PBL in teaching effectively improves students’ scores. Grade distribution of student project also demonstrates this insight.

Figure 8: Grade distribution of PBL classes in PSU Business Administration Collaboration Program

Through two above grade distribution figures of the two programs, the most frequent grade of the two programs do not differ much, but the average score of the PSU program is much higher. In addition, more than 50% of PSU program students’ score are above 7.6-8.3, while this score is 7.1-7.85 for the Vietnamese program. This difference is mainly due to two reasons: (1) PSU instructors have been better trained by Penn State University and they were active in using materials and applying PBL teaching method at the beginning of the program while Vietnamese program instructors were slower to adjust their syllabus when implementing PBL; (2) PSU instructors are more experienced over time in guiding students to perform problem assignments, adjusting contents closer to reality.

In addition, the percentage of students who passed the course in undergraduate classes (less than 35 students) is often higher than those in the overcrowded classes. Classes with fewer students are more convenient for organizing group exercises and case studies. The "Quick Check/Quizzes" accounts for 15% of the total, and faculty members often ask students to answer short questions about selected case studies of businesses according to book questions and usually add them. Questions related to the operation of enterprises in Vietnam or Southeast Asian countries - where there are significant differences in the environment compared to the mother country. This forces students to learn in advance through various sources of information, so easily achieve high scores. Case studies help students develop richer understanding in the real world. Therefore, it is necessary to have the combination between textbooks, PBL method and relevant assessment methodology to better classify students’ learning outcomes, which positively confirm H2.

5 Conclusion & Limitation

With the expectation that students will be able to apply knowledge and skills taught in International Business course to work well in foreign companies, DTU has used PBL to teach with adjustments for the PSU Business Administration Collaboration program to suit the business environment of Vietnam. Our study once again affirm that there were significant advances in student achievement in this subject. Plus, regarding the collaboration program, it is necessary to have a synchronous transfer including the syllabus, reading materials such as students’ textbooks and instructors’ manual as well as class organization and teaching methods adjusted under the local business conditions, academic environment and the abilities of learners.

Although the differences in academic performance show the superiority of the teaching methodology, the feedback from alumni who have learned PBL is also an important factor. We considered the latter is the critical drawback of our study. It will certainly be studied in the future.

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Thien Nguyen Le Giang¹, Dat Tran Tuan² and Ngon Nguyen Thi Tuyen³

¹ International School, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam, nguyenlgiangthien@dtu.edu.vn;

² International School, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam, trantuandat@dtu.edu.vn;

³ Faculty of Business Administration, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam, nguyenttuyenngon@dtu.edu.vn

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