Promoting innovative experiential learning practices to improve academic performance: Empirical evidence from a Spanish Business School

Abstract

tThere are plenty of theoretical studies addressing how active-based practices and methodologies influ-ence university students’ level of performance. However, there is a scarcity of works that bring empiricalevidence to sustain the existence of a positive link between the students’ involvement in experience-based learning methods and their academic results. The aim of this paper is to examine the impactexerted by an experiential learning based educational methodology on students’ level of academic per-formance. This research was carried out within the specific context of a Spanish private business school,using a sample of students belonging to the Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration at a SpanishBusiness School. Pearson’s correlation and structural equation modeling are applied to test the relation-ship hypothesized. Our results derived from the analysis of an undergraduate business students samplesuggest that getting involved in experience-based practices and managerial simulations constitutes aneffective approach to develop their competencies. Thus, we may conclude that fostering experientiallearning strategies favors the students’ understanding of theoretical concepts and leads to the attain-ment of superior performance. This paper contributes to management education by empirically testingthe value of innovative experiential learning based training.