Comparison of entrepreneurial mindset course learning objectives: Evaluating consistency and clarity

Abstract

The entrepreneurial mindset (EM) has become of increasing interest for engineering educators as a method to better prepare students for the workforce and generate more valuable innovations. In this paper, EM is defined in terms of six principles: Curiosity, Connections, Creating Value, Communication, Collaboration, and Character. These principles, labeled as the 6 C's, are adapted from materials from the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN). However, despite the increased adoption of EM by educators, few tools exist to aid evaluation of curricula through an EM lens and few studies investigate their effectiveness. Three EM course content evaluation tools have been created in the recent past by KEEN-affiliated universities: KEEN Student Outcomes (KSO), expanded KSO (eKSO), and Entrepreneurial Mindset Learning Objectives (EMLO). These tools have not yet been evaluated against one another to determine if they are measuring similar EM concepts. The goal of this paper is to compare and evaluate these three tools. To do so, each tool is used on three existing courses at The Ohio State University, each designed with EM in mind and each representing a different year within an undergraduate engineering curriculum. A document analysis was done for each course using each EM evaluation tool, generating nine datasets. The results for each course were then compared across the evaluation tools to measure similarities and differences between the three tools. It was found that the three tools were largely inconsistent with one another in their determination of the courses' level of adoption of the 6 C's of EM. Additionally, it was found that many aspects of the tools were overly abstract or particular, making them difficult to use for the purposes of measuring the EM content of a course. Although these three sets of objectives may be useful for integrating EM content in courses, the findings of this paper indicate that they are not measuring the same things and are thus difficult to utilize for the purposes of measurement.