2. Although the comments in the chapter about good form, proper format, and professional
appearance of the research report are indisputable, a way to convince students of these
necessities of report preparation is to show them a report that does not possess these
characteristics. If an Instructor has had an experience where a student team or an individual
student’s report was especially atrocious, it may be useful to make visuals of selected “bad”
spots and show them to the class and thereby generate class discussion on the errors and how
the flaws should have been handled.
3. As Instructors review the various sections of a research report, an effective approach is to
show or give students examples of each one. Use student reports from previous classes, or
use professional reports that have been acquired from consulting, business contacts, or
colleagues.
4. A form of oral presentation that is not emphasized in the chapter, but one that is nonetheless
important is the use of PowerPoint or PowerPoint-like “slide shows.” With the use of such
graphics programs, effective and impressive bullet charts, tables, and visuals can be
produced. Animation or other display options can be used very effectively. Most students are
quite familiar with presentation software such as PowerPoint, and it works seamlessly with
Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word, so the expectation for any oral presentation is that it
will be done with a slide show.
5. If students are to prepare team research project reports for sponsors, there is a concern about
quality control. One way to gain uniformity in team reports is to provide students with copies
of previous reports and to tell them to use these as “templates” for form, format, flow, and
style. Some Instructors retain word processor files of finished reports and provide them to
students as “templates” or electronic examples. After all, this is the way practicing marketing
researchers prepare their reports.
6. We have included step-by-step instructions on how to create Excel graphs. If students are
familiar with word processing, other spreadsheet, graphics, or other software and can
produce professional quality tables and graphs with these, they have the option of using these
programs. Excel table output is transportable to other software as raw data tables.
7. With team projects, students sometimes fail to utilize specialization. That is, the team
members should identify members’ special skills and allocate the work of the project
accordingly. For instance, one team member may be the statistical analysis specialist, another
may be the graphics person, and another may be the report writer. It is also prudent to have
the team identify an “enforcer” or someone who makes sure that the specialists perform their
work on time.
8. The Advanced Automobile Concepts integrated case can be used as the basis for a complete
report because it has the problem statement, research objectives, research method, and
dataset. To do so, would be an extension of the Advanced Automobile Concepts case at the
end of Chapter 15.
Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Prentice Hall
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