A systematic literature review on Engineering Entrepreneurship Education Learning Outcomes and Assessment Tools

Abstract

Recent technological advancement is moving our society towards a more innovative and entrepreneurial one. As a result, engineering entrepreneurship education gained popularity and adoption across major education institutes worldwide. Based on a national survey done by Industry Canada, over 98% of Canadian post-secondary institutes offered at least one course in entrepreneurship. Despite this wide adoption, we believe the research on the short-term learning outcomes and assessment for engineering entrepreneur education on students is inadequate. This is often because of the lack of research in the engineering entrepreneurship and the lack of definition of engineering entrepreneurship education learning outcomes. We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis of 123 studies on entrepreneurship education for undergraduate engineering students in North America in the past 15 years. We examined the learning outcomes defined and desired by major entrepreneurial educational institutes in North America and the assessment methods employed to measure the student learning outcomes. We particularly focused on the alignment between desired learning outcomes and assessment methods employed to study the validity and reliability of common assessment instruments. In this paper, we report on the results of the systematic literature review, identify the strength of common assessment instruments, and then describe the process we incorporate what we learned from this review into our engineering entrepreneurship education program.