Golden Duck Awards

Lynn Barnsback
CTCH 602
Spring 2009

Journal Article
Marketing Education Review
Volume 18, Number 1 Spring 2008

Golden Duck Awards: An Interactive Game to Facilitate Class Participation
Barbara Ross Wooldridge

The article explains the use of an actual Golden Duck, and a competition designed to help marketing professors encourage more and better class participation. The Author cites that “participation is frequently posited as an “active learning” strategy to engage students in the class (Dallimore et al 2006). ….Yet, studies have shown that the college classroom tends to be a spectator sport for students with professors speaking approximately 80% of the time”. Most of the syllabus I read appeared to have programs, usually class participation points, to help elevate the problem of ill prepared and under enthusiastic students. It is clearly a problem.

Wooldridge’ premise with this simple “Game” is that “competition can motivate students to maximize performance”. The Golden Duck is just that, a statue of a Duck that a student can win at semesters end. A smaller rubber duck is used during class, passed from student to student but only with “DUCK worthy” participation. Student add more context to their answer-just get the duck. At the end of class they vote for the best contributor and who gets to take the rubber duck home. At the end of the course, the students vote for the overall best contributor who then gets the larger duck statue, runners up receives the smaller rubber versions. Note, she does not give any points for participation; the Duck is the only motivator.

The Duck works best with classes for 25-40 students and used in classes that are primarily lectures. If class preparation slacks off, the Duck may “not want to play” and it is not used. This tactic can usually get the class to improve the quality of the participation.

The Author feels this is a successful tactic based upon the following information. 1. Her static’s that student’s participation increased from 30 to 95%. 2. The “Duck” also shows up in her evaluations as a favorite component of the class- spurring students into participation sometimes just so someone else does not get to win it. 3. Her evaluation scores have also improved although her course content remains the same. 4. After the course has concluded the Duck lives on. Former students will mail her ducks, bring the duck to other classes for luck and even travel with it.

The most important part of the Golden Ducks powers however are that it gets students to better prepare for and actively participate in class. They become better critical thinkers because they want to evaluate or argue a point and determine duck worthiness. Not to be overlooked, it allows the students to have some fun.