As we develop entrepreneurship courses we should develop evidence-based approaches to improving our students' intention to become entrepreneurs. My research looks at Entrepreneurial programming and finds that.
Investments in Entrepreneurial education have failed to develop educational programming that is actually increasing entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. We believe that foundational issues reside within the pedagogical approaches used in entrepreneurial education specifically as it relates to today's students.
Our research compared the learning outcomes of a problem-based class (students actually start a business) against the typical theory-laden approaches where students write a business plan or develop a business model. Students in the theory-laden class experienced a statistically significant decline in measures of entrepreneurial attitudes, subjective norms, perception of behavioral control, and intention after completing a course.
In contrast, we found that students in the problem-based classroom had statistically significant improvements in all measures after completing the course.
I presented a workshop at USASBE 2020 that compares and contrasts theory-laden approaches with problem-based learning. I focused on showing faculty effective ways to introduce problem-based methods to improve student entrepreneurial self-efficacy.