A social initiative aimed at challenging and extending the top students in a large first-year business course

Abstract

Aligning with our experiences as educators, studies show that the most gifted and talented students benefit from program enrichment beyond the traditional classroom. This paper discusses the proposed extension to the large and complex first-year team-based learning program at The University of Auckland Business School. Our proposal is to select the top 30 of approximately 1700 first-year students to participate in a project that integrates academic content and high performance teamwork in a real-world context. This is not normally experienced by students until final year studies if at all. Given the scale of the program, this unique study contributes to the literature by furthering our understanding of gifted and talented students performing in teams while completing a highly challenging task. An extension of this project will be to monitor this cohort of students throughout their studies and into future job opportunities.