Learning strategic representations: Exploring the effects of taking a strategy course

Paper highlights

Strategy courses are widely taught, but their effect is rarely measured using actual strategic judgments. This study follows 2,269 MBA students as they evaluate four real, small consumer-product startups before and after a required strategy course. The students did not know whether the ventures later succeeded or failed, but the researchers did, which made it possible to score each prediction for accuracy. Students became better at distinguishing stronger from weaker strategies, changed how they represented the problems, and felt more confident about making the judgments.

The course did more than teach vocabulary. Afterward, students considered more dimensions, paid greater attention to competition and industry conditions that consumers could not directly see, and expressed more awareness of uncertainty.

Study design

Students watched Kickstarter pitch videos for four consumer-product ventures—two that later succeeded and two that failed—at several points during the course. They predicted each venture’s outcome and explained the factors behind their judgment. Responses from students who already knew a venture were excluded. Because the ventures’ actual outcomes were known, the analysis could measure prediction accuracy alongside changes in the content and depth of students’ mental representations, perceived difficulty, and confidence.

Results at a glance

• Average decision accuracy increased by about seven percentage points.
• Representations became deeper and included more indirect competitive and industry considerations.
• Students became more confident and found the task less difficult, while also recognizing more uncertainty.
• Students with higher cognitive ability improved more in performance. Those with less prior business knowledge showed larger changes in performance and representations.
• Women remained less confident and reported greater difficulty than men even as their measured learning gains helped narrow some prior differences.

Why it matters

• The study measures strategic judgment on realistic cases, not framework recall or students’ reports that a course was useful.
• Students’ explanations became deeper and more attentive to industry structure, competition, and indirect causal forces.
• Confidence increased alongside greater recognition of uncertainty, rather than through treating strategy as deterministic.

How to use this paper

Cite this for

• Large-sample evidence that a strategy course can change decision accuracy, mental representations, and confidence.
• A design that scores strategic judgments against real venture outcomes rather than student self-reports.
• Evidence that strategy education can deepen representations and increase attention to industry and competitive forces.

Useful for teaching

• How to assess strategy learning beyond vocabulary and framework recall.
• Why better strategic judgment can coexist with greater awareness of uncertainty.
• How prior knowledge, cognitive ability, and gender relate to measured learning outcomes and self-perceptions.

Careful claim

In one required MBA strategy course, students improved in prediction accuracy and representational depth; the study does not show that every strategy course produces the same changes.

Abstract

Despite the popularity of strategy courses and the fact that managers make consequential decisions using ideas they learn in such courses, few studies have examined the learning outcomes of taking a strategy course—a research gap most likely due to the methodological challenges of measuring these outcomes in realistic ways. This paper provides a large-sample study of what individuals learn from taking a strategy course and how those learning outcomes depend on individual characteristics. We examine how 2,269 MBA students evaluate real-world video cases before and after taking the MBA core strategy course at a large US business school.

We document several changes in their performance, mental representations, and self-perceptions. Among other findings, we show that taking a strategy course improves strategic decision-making, increases the depth of mental representations and the attention paid to broader industry and competitive concerns, and boosts students’ confidence while making them more aware of the uncertainty pervading strategic decisions. We also find that the magnitude and significance of these changes are associated with individual characteristics such as cognitive ability, prior knowledge, and gender.

Other links

• SSRN preprint
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Last updated 2026-06-21