Abstract:

Thanks to real-world economic simulators, students can make decisions and observe their outcomes, and, in doing so, appraise their effectiveness. Experience-based instruction methods or experiential methods have the potential to overcome many of the limitations of the traditional paradigm. They contain different, more complex approaches to learning processes and the results; they enable interactivity and promote mutual learning and collaboration; they support both cognitive and affective aspects of learning; and, even more importantly, they promote active learning. Thanks to their dynamism and competitiveness, business games can be said to be a credible teaching method, as they reproduce reality, where business decisions are influenced, among many factors, by competitors. Insofar as students perceive some logic between their decisions and the game outcomes, this credibility will increase,
thereby leading students to take a favourable attitude towards the game. The main objective behind this study is to analyse which factors are really significant to be able to rate the effectiveness of the business game as a teaching method. This tool helps students to develop their teamwork skills. So, based on the factor analysis it has been demonstrated that the effectiveness of business games as a teaching method can be explained by four main factors: the game features, overall rating, knowledge of different areas acquired by the players and the interaction and dynamics between the instructors and the different teams. So, with this study and considering all these aspects, we can demonstrate that the proposed methodology can be useful to improve decision making in the distance student.

Keywords:

Factor analysis, decision making, distance learners.