Building a Measurement Tool for Entrepreneurship Education - a Participatory Development Approach

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to illustrate and model the construction of a Measurement Tool for Entrepreneurship Education where the tool itself is targeted toward Finnish teachers working in primary and secondary education. This study represents participatory action research (Argyris 1993) as the research context has been facilitated and provided by the researchers, and where the study objects initiate, respond, and develop their activities, thereby reforming the context further.

The presented case is an illustration of the building of a Measurement Tool for Entrepreneurship Education, prepared in an ESF-funded project. In this study we present multi-method, multi-investigator, multiple data, and multiple theory triangulation (Denzin 1988) settings. From the data, the phases of the measurement tool construction were identified.

Our aim is to present the process in order to link the theory and practice of entrepreneurship education. Here, a broad and multilayered definition of entrepreneurship education is utilized, and by making these aspects explicit the tool itself has a role not only as a teacher’s self-evaluation kit but also as a steering system for developing schools and regions on a larger scale.