Abstract
- This paper examines the process of student engagement and narrative transportation into two pedagogical tools (a narrative music video and a short teaching case) often used in global management classes to illustrate international and cross-cultural issues, and the effects that this process has on both enjoyment and the student’s ability to identify critical themes. Using a sample of students enrolled in international management classes, a structural equation model is estimated that empirically ties various elements such as belief consistency, disposition towards the principal characters in the narrative, personal need for cognition, and cognitive difficulty to the process of narrative transportation. The research provides evidence that the degree of a student’s transportation into the narratives of both the music video and the teaching case impacts both thematic comprehension and enjoyment, two important objectives of using such pedagogical tools in the classroom. With respect to the teaching case experiment, the study also examines how a student’s personal belief system impacts the preferred solution to the problems presented in the case.