Linking methods to outcomes: A multi-course mixed-method study of the effects of active and passive pedagogy on entrepreneurial intentions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2020.100420Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Conventional and entrepreneurial entrepreneurship education pedagogy are fundamentally different.

  • Type of pedagogy is not related to changes in students' entrepreneurial intentions during a course.

  • Most courses, some with entrepreneurial learning objectives, are taught in a conventional way.

  • Changing students' attitudes towards entrepreneurship requires an approach across the curriculum.

Abstract

This sequential mixed method study explores how pedagogy affects students' entrepreneurial intentions. It outlines how positivist and constructivist educational paradigms are the basis of conventional and entrepreneurial pedagogy, and how these paradigms manifest themselves in entrepreneurship course learning objectives and teaching strategies. This overview engenders a novel coding scheme that supports a double-coder qualitative content analysis of seventeen entrepreneurship course syllabi, from twelve universities in eight countries. The coding results are then quantified and incorporated into a hierarchical multiple regression analysis, using data from a pre-post course student survey (N = 232). Contrary to expectations, teaching strategies across the international sample remain relatively conventional, particularly assessments, even for courses that have mostly entrepreneurial course learning objectives. Furthermore, the results did not demonstrate any effect of pedagogy type on students' entrepreneurial intentions. From all control variables, only ‘pre-course entrepreneurial intentions’ and ‘study level’ are related to (an increase in) entrepreneurial intentions. Therefore, we recommend that universities target more mature students and do not rely on stand-alone entrepreneurship courses to instill aspirations of entrepreneurship among students. Instead, universities should strive to embed a more constructivist educational approach more widely throughout their curricula.

Introduction

Entrepreneurship courses and programs are gaining global prominence (Duval-Couetil, 2013; Gilje & Erstad, 2017; Kuratko, 2005). Entrepreneurship is increasingly being introduced as a compulsory topic in schools and universities (Jones & Iredale, 2010; Ruskovaara & Pihkala, 2014). Policy-makers and other stakeholders support this development. They are motivated by a wide range of expectations, such as better youth employment, an increase in citizen's employability skills, broadening students' understanding of entrepreneurship and business life and providing an engine for accelerating new venture creation (Lambert, Parker, & Neary, 2007; Mwasalwiba, 2010). Students appreciate what entrepreneurship education offers them and contribute to the demand (Kuratko, 2005).

It should be noted that entrepreneurship education may have different meanings (Hägg & Gabrielsson, 2019). A common distinction is made between education to support small business owners (Gibb, 1996), education to instill the mind-set and skills for enterprising behavior (Jones & Iredale, 2010), and education that focuses on the figure of the start-up entrepreneur and aspects associated with venture creation (Duval-Couetil, 2013).

In the field of entrepreneurship education, most impact studies have concentrated on assessing the extent to which the program or course increases students’ entrepreneurial intentions (Nabi, Liñán, Fayolle, Krueger, & Walmsley, 2017), as a well-supported predictor of future entrepreneurial behavior (Krueger, Reilly, & Carsrud, 2000; Schlaegel & Koenig, 2014). However, a recent meta-analysis was not able to establish a significant aggregate effect of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intentions (Bae, Qian, Miao, & Fiet, 2014), despite its positive expectations and numerous empirical confirmations (Nabi et al., 2017). This raises the question of whether entrepreneurship education only affects entrepreneurial intentions under certain circumstances. Few studies have explored the relationship between the outcomes of entrepreneurship courses or programs and the processes through which these outcomes are realized, in an attempt to discover how entrepreneurship education achieves its goals (Rideout & Gray, 2013).

Particularly the impact of various forms of teaching is increasingly emphasized as a key area of inquiry (Hägg & Gabrielsson, 2019). Although several studies have shown that course design is likely to influence course outcomes (Pardede, 2015), impact studies in general tend to under-describe the applied pedagogies (Martin, McNally, & Kay, 2013). This occurs so frequently that not even a recent systematic review was able to produce any definitive conclusions about which teaching model was the most beneficial (Nabi et al., 2017). Blenker, Elmholdt, Frederiksen, Korsgaard, and Wagner (2014) suggest that this is due to a tendency in the field to divide its labor between qualitative studies, which analyze learning processes and teaching methods, and quantitative studies, which are dedicated to impact measurement. In sum, we need more mixed method studies to explore and confirm explanations of variation in outcomes of entrepreneurship education (Blenker et al., 2014).

Lastly, few studies have involved multiple higher education institutions in different countries; a fact that lowers the generalizability of their results (Lorz, Mueller, & Volery, 2013). This lack of insight into the effects of entrepreneurship education pedagogy on entrepreneurial intentions, warrants a closer look at what could be best practices internationally, if there are any. An additional challenge, in the regard, is the apparent lack of a readily available conceptual framework to categorize entrepreneurship course pedagogy. The sub-field of entrepreneurship education contains various typologies of pedagogy, such as the practical-theoretical-dichotomy from Piperopoulos and Dimov (2015) and the supply-demand-competency framework from Nabi et al. (2017). Yet no study presents a comprehensive practical codification of how fundamental differences between types are practically visible in course design, i.e. learning objectives and various teaching strategies.

This study offers the following. First, we will describe the fundamental dichotomy that underlies approaches to entrepreneurship education pedagogy (section 2.1). Then we will describe how this dichotomy manifests itself in the different basic aspects of entrepreneurship course design, drawing on previous typologies and conceptualizations of entrepreneurship education pedagogy (section 2.2). Section 3 introduces the mixed method research design that we apply on our international sample, including qualitative comparative content analysis and quasi-experimental statistical analysis. The outcomes of the literature review will engender a novel coding scheme, which structures a double-coder, iterative content analysis of seventeen entrepreneurship course syllabi, from twelve higher education institutions in eight countries (section 4.1). Consequently, we will assess whether entrepreneurship education pedagogy influences students’ entrepreneurial intentions by using a hierarchical, multiple regression analysis of data obtained from a pre-post student survey with 232 two-time respondents (section 4.2). This analysis takes into account contextual differences by including various control variables, such as gender and country. Section 5 describes the results and discusses the theoretical and practical implications, after which section 6 offers our conclusions and describes the limitations of the study.

Section snippets

Fundamental differences in entrepreneurship education pedagogy

In this study, we use the term ‘entrepreneurship education’ broadly to refer to courses that center on any aspect of starting up or running a new venture: for example, the figure of the start-up entrepreneur, (start-up) innovation, new business development, small business management, techniques for opportunity recognition and steps in starting up a new venture. This excludes education to instill enterprising behavior as general skill as well as ‘embedded’ entrepreneurship education, wherein

Sample selection and characteristics

The data for this study consist of entrepreneurship course syllabi and students' answers to an online survey made before and after taking an entrepreneurship course in the years 2015 and 2016. The sample was formed by means of convenience sampling (Dörnyei, 2007). Entrepreneurship instructors could respond to a call for participation to be included in the project. The call for participation included our operational definition of ‘entrepreneurship education’, so that the instructors themselves

Hypothesis one: course design alignment

Contrary to our expectations, the findings could not confirm course design consistency, in terms of alignment between the stated learning objectives and the type of teaching strategies. Table 3 Three shows the results of the coding process. It also shows the results of a comparison between our expectations of what we anticipated conventional or entrepreneurial teaching strategies would score for learning objectives, versus the actual coded degree to which teaching strategies were conventional

Discussion

Previous studies emphasized the importance of an alignment between a course's learning objectives and its pedagogical approach, in entrepreneurship education (Cooper et al., 2004; Hytti & O’Gorman, 2004). However, our results showed that half of the courses stipulated entrepreneurial learning objectives, where most of their teaching activities were conventional. Then again, this does coincide with previous empirical results from Haase and Lautenschläger (2011) and Jones and Iredale (2010),

Conclusions

This study aimed to increase our knowledge about the relationship between entrepreneurship education outcomes and the process used to realize those outcomes. With this in mind, we described how the dichotomy of positivist versus constructivist pedagogy is the basis of the fundamental differences between conventional and entrepreneurial pedagogies in entrepreneurship education. We presented a conceptual framework, outlining how this dichotomy manifests itself in the main aspects of course

Funding details

This study is supported by the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at Abu Dhabi University (United Arab Emirates) with a Faculty Research Incentive Grant (no. 19300093) that facilitated proofreading. No funding source had a role in study design; the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; the writing of the report; nor the decision to submit the article for publication.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Anne Rienke van Ewijk: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Elena Oikkonen: Conceptualization, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Sophia Belghiti-Mahut: Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors have no conflict of interest to disclose.

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the instructors who enthusiastically volunteered to participate in this research project with their students. We also very much appreciate the feedback that we have received on previous versions of the paper by our peers and loved ones.

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