An Interactionalist Paradigm for Assessing Student Outcomes in Marketing Curriculums

An increased demand for reliable and valid assessments of student outcomes in higher educational settings coincides with the business communities’ increasing dissatisfaction with the quality of marketing education. The framework on which student outcomes assessments have customarily been based is the Institutional Effectiveness Paradigm. This paper systematically discusses the marketing channel-oriented shortcomings associated with this paradigm. Then, a framework guiding student outcome assessment is developed that is more compatible with the ontological core of marketing (the exchange process) and with the distinctive needs of the marketing educator’s constituencies. This framework is grounded in principles taken from relational exchange theory (Macneil 1980) and offers several advantages over current approaches.