KINGSTON, R.I. – Dec. 27, 2023 – A team led by University of Rhode Island doctoral student Priscilla Peña has won the 2023 Innovations in Teaching award from the Society of Marketing Advances for a strategy that uses competition to boost student participation and learning.

Peña and Jen Riley, senior lecturer of marketing at Vanderbilt University, presented the strategy, “The Participation Competition,” at the society’s annual conference in November in Fort Worth, Texas. A paper on the strategy, co-authored by Peña, Riley and Nicole Davis, a doctoral student in marketing at the University of Georgia, will be published in the spring by Market Education Review in a special issue on teaching innovations.

Peña, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in marketing at URI, puts a large emphasis on participation in the marketing classes she teaches. But when she first started teaching in fall 2020, as students returned to in-person classes during the pandemic, she noticed it was hard to get students to participate, even to answer general questions. 

“For me, participation is very important for various reasons,” she said. “It allows me to see if students are understanding the topics. It helps keep their attention, and it adds different perspectives to the class. So, I was thinking of ways to change how students view participation from a task to something fun and engaging.”

Peña, who likes to use game-oriented teaching strategies, used an approach that turned participation into a sport. Students formed four- to five-person teams and scored points by taking part in discussions, answering questions, and adding to the class. Regular displays of team scores kept the competition transparent and the students motivated, she said.

As soon as she told students about the game, they were quick to adopt it, she said. “I got good reviews from the students, or they let me know they wanted their team to win,” she said. “They weren’t necessarily thinking of participating, but they wanted a point. It really changed their mindset behind it.”

Other instructors at URI also tried the approach with positive results in their classrooms. Peña collaborated with Riley and Davis to officially test the approach in several marketing classes at URI and the University of Georgia. They found students in classes that used the competition strategy were more engaged than students in classes not using the strategy. 

“We also saw that the students were preparing more for class, so they had the opportunity to answer questions,” Peña said. “And they also were more engaged inside and outside of class.”

While the strategy came as a response to reports of a negative impact on students’ socio-emotional development because of the pandemic, Peña said, it also was inspired by the potential impact of competition on dopamine levels, especially in individuals with ADHD. 

“What was rewarding to me was that it was never meant to be a paper. It was just meant to create a better experience for the students,” she said. “Now faculty at other schools can have access to it and see if it works in their classroom.”

While teaching is just part of her work as a Ph.D. student, it was the reason she decided to pursue a doctoral degree after obtaining her master’s degree in marketing from the University of Alabama. One of her goals was to give back to her community by increasing faculty diversity in the classroom.

“Nationally, we don’t have a large representation of minority professors,” said Peña, past president of the Marketing Doctoral Student Association at The Ph.D. Project, which provides support, mentoring, and community engagement to help students from underrepresented communities earn doctoral degrees. “If we’re looking specifically at Hispanic and Latina professors, the number of full-time faculty is not necessarily equal. I wanted to increase representation in the classroom. But teaching is also something that I truly enjoy.”

“Priscilla is always looking for ways to give back—both in teaching and research,” said Lauren Labrecque, Peña’s Ph.D. advisor in marketing. “In terms of research, she chooses topics that she is truly passionate about. She chooses research that can make a difference in the world over other topics that may have an easier path to publication but wouldn’t have a societal impact.”

In her research, Peña blends an interest in psychology and marketing – her major and minor, respectively, during her undergraduate days at Georgia State University – to pursue research that she feels is meaningful.

For her dissertation, she has focused on brand activism, business efforts to promote certain social or political stances. In particular, her research looks at what happens when a company is accused of inauthentic brand activism – or “woke washing” – when its actions don’t align with its message.  

“I think there is a general consensus that marketing is just about selling,” said Peña, who has earned awards from the College of Business in teaching and research. “It’s a lot more than that. It borrows from a lot of disciplines. With my research, I’m looking at how marketing can help consumers. And by consumers, I just mean us. That’s why this research looks at the different types of outcomes that brand activism can have.”

In June, Peña’s paper based on her dissertation research captured the Best Student Paper award at the American Marketing Association (AMA) Marketing and Public Policy Conference in Arlington, Virginia. Her paper is now under review for publication. 

It was one of numerous conferences she attended last summer. In all, Peña, who loves to travel, spent nearly a month away from her home in Newport to attend conferences.

She also attended the Ph.D. Project’s Marketing Doctoral Student Association conference, held in association with AMA, where she was a winner of the Valuing Diversity Scholarship. She also traveled to Norway for the association’s Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium, an elite gathering of Ph.D. students; and to London for the Transformative Consumer Research Conference to conduct joint research with a team of professors and doctoral students on brand activism.

Peña, who is scheduled to graduate in the spring, has already accepted a job at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, where she will start next fall as an assistant professor of marketing.

“What I’ve really liked about URI is that I’ve been able to grow in various ways, as a teacher, a scholar, and a researcher,” she said. “My students are amazing, and I brag about them all the time. And my advisor, Lauren, and my dissertation committee are very nurturing. I think that’s the environment I do best in, and that’s the environment I bring into my classroom.”