Evaluating content dimensions in entrepreneurship education

Abstract

Interest in entrepreneurship education is growing over the world, especially in innovation

based economies, such as Denmark (GEM, 2010). However, we know rather little about the

outcomes of entrepreneurship education, in particular with respect to which type of course

content produces the best results (i.e. most high performing entrepreneurs) and how this

affects different types of students. There is a great variety of different views in the field of

research concerning the content and structure of entrepreneurship courses, but no

comprehensive study has as yet been done in which these competing views are clearly

articulated as rivals and tested against each other. There is also a lack of programme

evaluations that use control groups and have a longitudinal design (Gorman, Hanlon & King,

1997; Matlay, 2008). Those that have this setup often experience methodological problems

due to their conceptual framework (Krueger, 2009), or they have a view of entrepreneurship

that does not take into account the advancements within research that have been made during

the last decade (Sarasvathy, 2008). Thus, we clearly need to dig deeper into this field in order

to create methods and models that allow us to evaluate the outcomes of different types of

entrepreneurship courses.

With the beginning of 2011, the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship – Young

Enterprise1

initiated a research project with the aim to further our understanding of the type of

impact entrepreneurship education and different educational designs have on different types

of students. Two longitudinal quasi-experimental surveys, one with a focus on elementary- and secondary-level education and one with focus on tertiary-level education, will be

performed and databases with students from all parts and levels of the Danish educational

system will be created. The surveys will use entrepreneurial self-efficacy (Mauer, Neergaard

& Kirketerp, 2009) as a performance indicator, but in order to generate robust results the

development of new measurement tools is needed. In this paper the initial phases of this

project and the research design of these two surveys will be presented.