INCREASING THE PRO-ACTIVITY IN HUMAN FACTORS SIMULATION FOR CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT EDUCATION

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.