2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

A CALL TO ACTION: A RESEARCH AGENDA TO COMBAT DECLINING
READING PROFICIENCY OF MARKETING COLLEGE STUDENTS
Andrew B. Artis, University of South Florida, College of Business,
3433 Winter Lake Rd., Lakeland, FL 33803; aartis@lakeland.usf.edu
ABSTRACT
The "alarm bell" has been rung by policymakers and
employers who are calling for educators to address
the two-decade decline in reading proficiency of
college graduates, but re-establishing appropriate
reading skills for an entire generation is a daunting
task. For instance, past research has largely been
done by groups with extensive resources (e.g.,
government agencies). Hence, for individual
marketing educators with limited resources to play a
meaningful role in combating this problem there is a
need for a coordinated effort. This paper attempts to
establish a research agenda to help prioritize the
objectives and to orchestrate a grassroots effort to
mount a timely and effective response.
A CALL TO ACTION
Marketing educators need to address two conflicting
trends. First, the reading skills of college students
are projected to continue to decline as they have for
the past two decades. Second, marketing graduates
need to increase their reading proficiency to cope
with the explosion of information in the modern
workplace. The extent of this conflict was recently
made clear by the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) in its comprehensive and sobering 2007
report, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of
National Consequence. The NEA concluded:
• Reading skills are in decline for college-bound
young adults produced by the U.S. educational
system.
• The poor reading skills of college students
adversely affect their ability to perform in the
classroom and render them unprepared for
professional careers.
• The lack of reading skills and general disinterest
in reading by college students will cause
economic hardships for individual graduates and
threaten the viability of the U.S. economy to
compete globally.
For marketing educators the decline in the reading
proficiency of their students has an immediate
negative impact on the effectiveness of traditional
teaching methods that rely heavily on students'
ability to read and comprehend educational
materials. Perhaps even more dangerous to
marketing educators, both graduates and employers
question the value of a college education when
degrees are awarded to students with insufficient
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skills to complete their basic job tasks. The decline
in reading proficiency of college students comes at a
time when these skills are of critical importance.
Modern marketing professionals need to remain
competitive through greater self-directed learning,
and research suggests that a person’s avidity for
reading and greater reading proficiency promote
more extensive and effective self-directed learning
(Artis & Harris, 2007).
In addition, business professionals need a variety of
reading skills just to manage properly the extensive
amount of pertinent information available online and
in print. For example, approximately 65 million books
are currently in existence (The Economist, 2007)
and over 100,000 new books are published annually
in the U.S. alone (Howard, 2007). For marketing
educators this suggests that their students need to
learn a variety of skills to enable them to first identify
what reading materials are important to their
professional success and then to consume
effectively diverse types of practitioner-based
literature.
What then are marketing educators expected to do?
A proactive plan of action is needed where
marketing educators take partial ownership of the
problem and responsibility for the solution. Hence,
as a group, marketing scholars need to set priorities
and provide a general plan of action. Individual
marketing scholars will need to understand their
specific role in solving the problem even if it means
changing reading skills, behaviors and attitudes one
student at a time. Foremost, there is an immediate
need to identify and test tools, techniques and
methods that effectively promote proficient reading
skills for marketing students that lead to immediate
success in the classroom and to long-term success
as professionals.
ESTABLISHING A RESEARCH AGENDA
A research agenda is needed so that marketing
scholars – educators and researchers – can
effectively combine their limited resources to
efficiently identify the most relevant problems and
develop effective solutions. Five central research
questions can help organize the information and
focus the attention of marketing scholars.