Abstract:

Background
Simulated scenarios have been identified as an effective means to prepare Construction Management students to deal with the dynamics of human factors in real life. However, some students have a tendency to memorize reactions identified by the simulator as being favourable and show limited pro-activity in decision-making.

Purpose (Hypothesis)
The area of conflict between teaching a variety of possible reactions to simulated scenarios on the one hand and the need to increase students’ pro-activity on the other, can be overcome by increasing the necessary pro-activity during the decision-making process.

Design/Method
This paper describes methods of how to increase pro-activity to a discrete-event Human Factors in Construction Management Simulation and the resulting outcomes. The change of learning effectiveness in a cross-cultural education setting is also analyzed and reported here by evaluating data obtained through student surveys and testing. The Construction Manager Simulator was built using the JAVA programming language®, and special aspects needed in the programming are reported here.

Results
The overall learning effectiveness increased by x% . At the same time, the increased pro-activity led to the students’ perception that using the simulator became more difficult (y%) and that “correct answers” became more difficult to memorize (z%).

Conclusions
Increasing pro-activity during the decision-making process decreases the tendency of memorizing the reactions which the simulator identifies as being favourable. It is also shown that students sharpen their decision-making skills by interacting with a variety of possible reactions.

Keywords:

Construction management, education, human factors, simulation, learning effectiveness.