Abstract:

OBJECTIVES: How and when do University teachers discover their motivation and vocation to be instructors? Testing “students as teachers” capabilities might be a way of offering them the chance to better explore their own aspirations, while acquiring knowledge through experiential learning. This paper aims to present an in class-exercise conducted within master’s students: postgraduate psychologists enrolled in a “free course” on Marketing at Universidad de Valencia (Spain), within the Erasmus Mundus European Master in Work, Organizational, and Personnel Psychology (WOP-P (https://www.uv.es/erasmuswop/), from the Faculty of Psychology.
METHOD. The paper describes the whole process conducted with 10 students taking this course on Marketing as an extension of their knowledge on Organizational Psychology. As most of them have no background on Business nor Marketing, the instructor chooses an hybrid area for both Marketing and Psychology which corresponds to Consumer Behavior (Topic 5 in the syllabus). Accordingly, as part of the on-going evaluation, students are asked to run this exercise for which they are given then following guidelines:
• You are experts in understanding social and psychological aspects that affect consumer behavior. Prepare in group a brief lecture on these aspects and present it to the teacher and to your classmates (3 groups of 3-4 people)
• Each group chooses one type of factors (social, personal or psychological). The coursework document contains slides and examples you can use (e.g. David Beckham for lifestyle; “desperate housewives” serial for reference groups…), but you must add your own ones (try not to exceed 15 min time).
• An in-class discussion will be held after each presentation, among students with the teacher. For this in class exercise, a Consumer Behavior researcher from a partner University was invited to class, in order to animate the discussion after each presentation. Both the guest speaker and the teacher comment on the accuracy of each example, and eventually correct, or provide extra ones.

Specific variables that are explained in the exercise and for which the paper provides example are.
A. Social Factors: reference groups, family, opinion leaders, role and status
B. Personal Factors: lifestyle, age and family life cycles: personality and self-concept:
A. Psychological Factors: motivation, perception, learning. The teacher encourages students to be both inductive (find examples and relate them to the concept) and deductive (define the concept and find the best example to illustrate it in our Consumer Behavior)

CONCLUSION
The results (and therefore the learning outcome for students) derived from this exercise are twofold:
a) For students: they acquire the structure knowledge from Consumer Behavior theory, which is useful for both their personal and professional life.
b) For the teacher (and the guest speaker): new examples and skills for inductive knowledge are obtained, bridging the two disciplines
of Psychology and Marketing.
The paper presents examples of student presentations and discusses the knowledge derived from the exercise, bridging both disciplines in terms of inductive and deductive methods.

Keywords:

students as teachers; consumer behavior variables, psychology, marketing, in class exercise