Assessing Entrepreneurship
It’s too complex for a single measure.
By Şenay Purzer, Nicholas D. Fila, and Kavin Nataraja
Let’s say you’re planning an entrepreneurship initiative in your institution. Perhaps you’re introducing a new entrepreneurship course for engineering students, or a certificate program, minor, or major. Perhaps you’re looking to incorporate entrepreneurial content in your thermodynamics course. How will you know whether your initiative has been successful? As with many educational innovations, one of the primary challenges educators face is finding assessment instruments and methods to provide fair and valid inferences of student learning and programmatic success.
We conducted a comprehensive literature search to explore the existing methods used to assess engineering entrepreneurship. We found a total of 52 relevant assessment instruments, including seven distinct assessment types (surveys, project deliverables, essays, quizzes, interviews, concept map exercises, and observations of student behavior) and eight distinct assessment topics (business planning, design, communication, business realization, teamwork, leadership, professional practice, and general conceptions of entrepreneurship). The variety in these instruments reveals that engineering entrepreneurship is not viewed as a unified construct, but composed of diverse knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Hence, a single instrument would not be sufficient to demonstrate success, but a system of instruments is needed to capture the complexity of engineering entrepreneurship.
For classroom assessment, the keys are to plan assessment activities along with learning activities and to assess student progress on specific competencies rather than specific deliverables. First, start with a list of competencies you want students to develop by the end of the course. The topics discussed earlier (e.g., business realization) may provide some guidance. Next, create a matrix that aligns competencies with evidence pieces (deliverables students will complete, observations, tests, etc.), which make up opportunities for assessment. Through such mapping, you might see some competencies are under- or over-assessed throughout a semester. One important finding of our study was that assessment took a variety of forms; yet, there is also the need and opportunity for creativity in developing new ways of assessment.
Our study demonstrated that there are a variety of assessment instruments that engineering educators may be able to use for programmatic assessment purposes. However, the first consideration should be evaluating the appropriate use of these instruments, ideally with input from the developers of the instrument and insights from small-scale pilot studies. How confident are you that students will interpret items as intended? What are the appropriate uses of assessment results? Many of the assessments we found were not evaluated for fairness and validity for the contexts in which they were used. We suggest collecting your own validity evidence and collaborating with assessment experts on this process.
Assessment provides a means to track student progress and to evaluate the success of our educational initiatives. One key question moving forward is: What is unique about engineering entrepreneurship compared with conceptualizations in other fields, such as business? We must find new ways to assess the knowledge, skills, and attitudes across the topics that are important for engineers, and we must do so in ways that are appropriate, relevant, and meaningful for our students. With 52 assessments and counting, we have a good start.
Senay Purzer is an associate professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, where Nicholas D. Fila is a doctoral candidate. Kavin M. Nataraja is a software developer at J.P. Morgan Chase. This article is excerpted from “Evaluation of Current Assessment Methods in Engineering Entrepreneurship Education” in the Winter 2016 issue of Advances in Engineering Education. (Supported by NSF Grant 1150874)
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