Evaluation of a Joint Health Communication Campaign Simulation between an Ad/PR Capstone Course and a Health Communication Class:

AbstractA quasi-experimental study was conducted to assess attainment of assignment objectives plus course-level cognitive and affective learning for a joint simulation between an advertising/public relations capstone course and a health communication class. Two treatment and two control sections of the capstone course were compared over a period of two years. In comparison to the control condition, students in the treatment sections reported themselves more likely to continue to stay abreast of information about the subject matter covered in the course than students in the control condition, and viewed their campaigns as of higher quality. Differences with respect to confidence about ability to produce health communication campaigns in the real world, as well anticipation that they would talk about the topic after the semester was over, approached significance. No differences in cognitive learning emerged.Just more than a decade ago Coombs and Rybacki (1999) called for increased pedagogical research in the field of public relations. Noting that the educational process typically is divided into four major components - outcomes, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment - they asserted that only three of these had received attention in the field. 'Tedagogy, the delivery of course content," they stated, "is the forgotten element in discussions of assessing public relations education" (p. 56). Coombs and Rybacki based this call on their analysis of data collected at a summer conference on public relations education conducted by the National Communication Association in 1998. At that time they concluded that although pedagogical practices in the field placed a laudable emphasis on active learning, empirical research on the effectiveness of pedagogical approaches was sparse. This paper responds to Coombs and Rybacki by reporting the results of an evaluation of a problem-based learning approach to a health communication campaign assignment, jointly conducted by an advertising/public relations capstone course and a health communication class.Problem-Based LearningHistory of PBL. One pedagogical model that has gained attention in recent years in some marketing programs is problem-based learning (PBL). Originally formalized in medical schools in the 1950s and 1960s, PBL was a reaction to the prevailing practice of filling students like a bucket with a broad range of knowledge from which they were expected to retrieve the appropriate cup or spoonful when a specific case called for it. In contrast, PBL presented students with complex historical cases typical of real patients, which students then worked in teams to solve. By forcing students to struggle with multistate, complex cases, PBL was assumed to provide a memorable context for learning not only the primary subject matter, but also a range of "soft" skills, such as research, teamwork and written and oral communication. Use of PBL spread to other science education contexts such as engineering, and finally into the humanities and social sciences (Allen, Donham & Bernhardt, 2011). Some (Wee, Alexandria, Kek & Kelley, 2003) have argued that PBL approaches, in combination with team-based learning models (Chad, 2012), are better suited than traditional approaches to prepare graduates for careers in communication, especially in graduate-level courses.Evaluation of PBL in medical schools has yielded mixed results, with some meta-analyses suggesting that PBL is generally superior to traditional models (see Vernon & Blake, 1993) and other reviews indicating it has modest or no beneficial effect on student learning of course content (see Albanese & Mitchell, 1993). Recent and more nuanced assessments, though, suggest that students with PBL experience may be advantaged when it comes to linking concepts and principles to applications (Gijbels, Dochy, Van den Bossche & Segers, 2005) and critical thinking (Tiwari, Lai, So & Yuen, 2006). Students themselves tend to report positive attitudes toward PBL, citing it as challenging and motivating (Vernon & Blake, 1993). …