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Method Article
This protocol embeds a diagnosis-decision-defense competition sequence into undergraduate Strategic Management instruction through staged team tasks, structured feedback, rater training, implementation-fidelity monitoring, and separate student- and team-level outcome review.
Strategic Management instruction requires students to apply analytical frameworks to uncertain, resource-constrained, and trade-off-based business situations. Course competitions can support this process when they are organized as a structured instructional system rather than as a single presentation activity. This article describes a reproducible protocol for integrating a three-stage course-based competition into an undergraduate Strategic Management course. The protocol follows a 16-week sequence that includes baseline assessment, core instruction, enterprise case introduction, team formation, strategic diagnosis, strategic decision simulation or decision-sheet completion, final strategy defense, post-course assessment, and course review. The instructional mechanism combines staged practice, enterprise case exposure, structured formative feedback, team accountability, oral defense, and rubric-based scoring. Locally operationalized process indicators are used to monitor classroom interaction, case-design completeness, feedback timeliness, task-rubric alignment, student engagement, and implementation fidelity. Student-level outcomes, team-level competition outcomes, rater agreement, missing-data patterns, artificial intelligence use disclosure, and score-inflation warning patterns are analyzed separately to avoid unit-of-analysis problems. Representative results, when reported, should be interpreted as context-specific implementation outputs from a retrospective, non-randomized educational-record comparison, not as evidence of causal effectiveness. The protocol provides an auditable procedure for designing, implementing, documenting, evaluating, and refining competition-integrated Strategic Management instruction within a course-improvement cycle.
Strategic Management courses require students to move beyond conceptual recall. Students must apply ideas such as industry structure, competitive advantage, resource allocation, strategic choice, and implementation under conditions of incomplete information and competing priorities. Competitive positioning explains how firms choose positions under external constraints1, whereas the resource-based view emphasizes firm-specific resources and capabilities that shape strategic options2. These perspectives make Strategic Management suitable for applied teaching designs in which students diagnose a business situation, make a s....
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The research use of de-identified educational records from both cohorts was approved by the Teaching Research Ethics Committee of Zhuhai College of Science and Technology, Zhuhai, China (Approval No.20260507001; approval date: 7 May 2026). The approval covered the protocol cohort and the historical comparison cohort, including routine course records, surveys, classroom observations, team process records, competition scores, rater scores, learning platform records, and de-identified gradebook variables. The 16-week course was delivered as routine Strategic Management teaching prior to data extraction for research, and no identifiable research dataset was extracted, cod....
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The representative results show the outputs generated by the 16 week competition-integrated Strategic Management course improvement protocol. Results are organized by implementation fidelity, instructional quality, student-level outcomes, team-level outcomes, and predefined warning patterns. Because the data came from routine educational cohorts with a historical comparison group rather than randomized assignment, all results should be interpreted as context-specific implementation and evaluation outputs, not causal evid.......
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This protocol provides a reproducible approach for embedding a teaching-competition sequence into an undergraduate Strategic Management course. Its purpose is not to add a competition event to an existing course, but to convert competition into a structured course-improvement process that links strategic diagnosis, decision making, formative feedback, final defense, and post-course evaluation. The instructional value, therefore, depends on the design of the sequence rather than on the presence of competition alone. Compe.......
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The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
The authors thank the students and teaching staff who participated in and supported the implementation of the course-based competition activities. The authors also acknowledge the Business School of Zhuhai College of Science and Technology for providing non-financial institutional support for routine instructional implementation, course coordination, and data organization. This study was supported by the 2024 Guangdong Provincial Undergraduate University Teaching Quality and Teaching Reform Project of Higher Education Teaching Reform (Grant No. 1174).
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| Name | Company | Catalog Number | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI-use disclosure form | Author-developed | AI-Disclosure-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Records disclosed AI use for each major submission |
| Baseline Strategic Management knowledge test | Author-developed | SMKT-Pre-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Measures Week 1 baseline knowledge |
| Classroom observation checklist | Author-developed | Observation-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Records classroom interaction and instructional process quality |
| Cleaning log | Author-developed | Cleaning-Log-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Records data checks, corrections, exclusions, and dataset lock |
| Competition handbook | Author-developed | Handbook-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Defines task sequence, submission rules, rubrics, AI disclosure, oral checks, appeals, and deadlines |
| Data dictionary | Author-developed | Data-Dictionary-v1.0; Supplementary Table 2 | Defines variables, coding ranges, data sources, and missing-data rules |
| De-identified dataset workbook | Author-developed | Dataset-Workbook-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Stores student-level, team-level, and class-session-level variables |
| Enterprise or anonymized case package | Author-developed or enterprise-approved | CasePack-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Provides the strategic decision context |
| Final defense slide template | Author-developed | FSD-Template-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Guides Task 3 slide deck structure |
| Final strategy defense scoring form | Author-developed | FSDSF-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Records Task 3 rater scores and Q&A assessment |
| IBM SPSS Statistics | IBM | Version 27.0; institutional or personal license | Descriptive statistics, group comparisons, effect sizes, and ICC analysis |
| Individual case-analysis task sheet | Author-developed | ICATS-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Defines individual case-analysis requirements and scoring domains |
| Knowledge-test answer key | Author-developed | SMKT-Key-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Supports knowledge-test scoring |
| Microsoft Excel | Microsoft | Excel 2021; institutional or personal license | Data entry, data dictionary, cleaning log, table preparation, and source-data checks |
| Oral-check record form | Author-developed | Oral-Check-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Records individual oral-check questions and responses |
| Peer contribution form | Author-developed | PCF-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Records peer contribution and contribution imbalance |
| Post-course learning survey | Author-developed | PCLS-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Measures satisfaction, relevance, feedback usefulness, collaboration, workload, and perceived improvement |
| Post-course Strategic Management knowledge test | Author-developed | SMKT-Post-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Measures Week 16 post-course knowledge using an equivalent form |
| Rater training file | Author-developed | Rater-Training-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Provides calibration files, descriptors, examples, and common scoring errors |
| Statistical output file | Software-generated | Statistical-Output-v1.0; archived with locked analysis folder | Stores statistical outputs with the analysis file and dataset version |
| Strategic decision sheet | Author-developed | SDS-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Guides Task 2 decision output |
| Strategic diagnosis report template | Author-developed | SDR-Template-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Guides Task 1 report structure |
| Student code linkage file | Author-developed restricted file | Student-Code-Linkage-v1.0; stored separately by data manager | Links student identity and research code before de-identification |
| Task-rubric alignment checklist | Author-developed | Alignment-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Checks alignment among learning outcomes, task outputs, scoring criteria, and feedback points |
| Team charter template | Author-developed | Team-Charter-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Records role allocation, communication rules, deadlines, and contribution expectations |
| Team process log | Author-developed | Team-Process-Log-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Records meeting attendance, decisions, progress, problems, and next actions |
| Version-control table | Author-developed | Version-Control-v1.0; Supplementary File 1 | Tracks version number, date, editor, reason, and approval status |
| Wenjuanxing online survey platform | Wenjuanxing | Web-based platform; institutional or user account access | Baseline survey, post-course survey, peer contribution form, and AI-disclosure exports |
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