The effect of maker and entrepreneurial education on self-efficacy and creativity

Abstract

Makerspaces and the availability of digital maker tools offer opportunities to create with their hands. Makerspaces and making have increasingly found their ways into institutions of formal and informal education but have yet not been explored in entrepreneurship education. Maker education holds the premise that learners work in a self-regulated and interdisciplinary way and develop a mind-set that enhances their self-organisation and self-efficacy. In the context of a European project, an educational programme, which combined maker and entrepreneurial education for fostering entrepreneurial thinking, skills and attitudes, was developed. This paper aims to understand and evaluate the direct effect of this maker educational programme on the development of non-cognitive (entrepreneurial) skills and attitudes, i.e. in relation to self-efficacy and creativity, as core elements of an “entrepreneurial spirit”. A creativity drawing test as well as a self-efficacy questionnaire were used to evaluate the maker educational programme and to measure individual effects on study participants. The analysis of the results shows a positive effect at the individual level in both creativity and self-efficacy when taking age and gender differences into account. A better understanding of the relationship between age as well as location specific settings and the resulting benefits in creativity and self-efficacy would be a worthwhile follow up research.