Developing Strategic Thinking

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to improve the understanding of an educational intervention’s impact on the development of strategic thinking. To get a better understanding, this study examined the impact of the one-year Master’s programme International Strategic Management (ISM) and a metacognitive awareness module, on business students’ ability to think strategically. To comprehend this impact, this study 1) used the Cognitive Process Profile (CPP) as the assessment tool for measuring the strategic thinking capability, and 2) examined the intention of ISM and the metacognitive awareness module to develop strategic thinking. In total 29 participants were non-randomly assigned to three sample groups and underwent an assessment of their strategic thinking capability at three different moments throughout the academic year. Within this research, quantitative data obtained from the CPP was analysed using nonparametric statistics, and coalesced with qualitative data, obtained from the ISM syllabi and in-depth interviews. The findings of this study did not show any significant improvement of students’ overall ability to think strategically, neither after ISM nor after the participation in the metacognitive awareness module.