Evolving students' conceptions about responsible entrepreneurship: a classroom experiment

Abstract

PurposeEntrepreneurship education scholarship has been recently challenged to look at what goes on inside the entrepreneurship classroom to assess what students are really learning. Relying on the construction and analysis of a 3-h long set of learning activities on responsible entrepreneurship, this paper focuses on the activities conducted and what students have learned, based on Bloom's revised taxonomy of educational objectives.Design/methodology/approachThis paper builds on a pre-/post-intervention assessment around a set of learning activities with 151 undergraduate students. Before and after the class, students were asked to produce a definition of responsible entrepreneurship. They were also asked to reflect on what had changed from the beginning.FindingsAnalysis of students' pre/post definitions shows a standardization of their conceptions of responsible entrepreneurship. This result confirms that the learning objective of this class was met. Nevertheless, applying Bloom's revised taxonomy to students' reflections allows for more nuanced interpretation. The analysis indeed revealed that some students manifest relatively superficial learning while other shows a deeper ability to reflect on the concept.Originality/valueFirst, this paper contributes to the entrepreneurship education literature by showing the relevance of using Bloom's revised taxonomy for both teaching and research purposes. Second, it presents a set of innovative learning activities on responsible entrepreneurship that could be easily reproduced in other educational contexts. Third, it shows the importance of asking students what they learned and what has changed for them through class activities.