The Research Of MBA Students’ Mental Model Change Process

With the rapid development of knowledge economy in21st century, current educational system gains not only great opportunities but also serious challenges. It requires the personnel education not only to adapt to the changing external environment but also to develop good study initiatives and methods, for continuous study and innovative knowledge. However, nowadays business education usually lacks efficient connections to the external environment; it hardly helps students to solve the complicated problems occurred in the real-world. Some scholars have realized the important role that mental model played in teaching, but in business education there is neither further research of taking mental model as teaching and learning’s consequence nor analysis on the cognitive process of mental model changing.This paper starts from the reality of business education, based on MBA students’ interviews, using a grounded theory approach with progressive decode to research the deep-seated logistic relations among the concepts issued from interviews, obtained MBA students’ mental model developmental stages、dynamic process for each stages and related influencing factors by analyzing:(1)MBA students’ mental model has three cognitive states-"ignorance""receiving" and "believing";(2) these states generalized MBA students’ cognitive process in new things from the lower level to the upper;(3)Curiosities, Verification theory, System utilization, Repeating consolidation are the influencing factors which promoted above cognitive states.Meanwhile, for business education researching and utilization of mental model, this paper proposed concrete methods and suggestions about how to continuously improve MBA education contents and learning methods from the perspectives of MBA educators and students.