Improving Undergraduate Student Performance on the Littlefield Simulation

This paper reports the results of an experiment to improve the performance of undergraduate business students at a large public university on the widely used team-based Littlefield management simulation. Results show that structured pre- and post-simulation team assignments significantly improved performance as measured by the percentage of teams with ending cash balances higher than the “Do Nothing” team that serves as a benchmark. Furthermore, the combination of an individual quiz administered before the simulation, and the structured team assignments resulted in the largest and most statistically significant improvement over the standard unstructured post-simulation assignment alone.