Thank You for Being a Friend: A Peer-Learning Approach to Marketing Education

Peer learning, a pedagogical approach whereby students are partnered together to have one student actively help another student learn predetermined content or skills, has long been utilized as an effective complement to more traditional instructional methods across a wide range of educational disciplines. This approach has been found to reduce the stress of learning, increase student engagement, and yield benefits to both the tutor and the tutee to a roughly equal degree. Yet, pedagogical research to this point has mostly failed to explore the usefulness of this approach to marketing and sales education. In the present research, we examine the effectiveness of peer-learning applications in a sales context and discuss marketing educators' implications. More specifically, we assess college sales students’ perceptions of peer-learning role-play exercise and further examine whether peer-learning exercises can improve students’ abilities. The results indicate that peer-learning exercises are not only enjoyed by students but are capable of producing objective performance improvement for both introductory and advanced students.