Measuring Student Transformation in Entrepreneurship Education Programs

Abstract

This article describes how to measure student transformation primarily within a university entrepreneurship degree program. Student transformation is defined as changes in knowledge (“Head”), skills (“Hand”), and attitudinal (“Heart”) learning outcomes. Following the institutional impact model, student transformation is the primary goal of education and all other program goals and aspects of quality desired by stakeholders are either input factors (professors, courses, facilities, support, etc.) or output performance (number of startups, average starting salary, % employment, etc.). This goal-setting framework allows competing stakeholder quality expectations to be incorporated into a continuous process improvement (CPI) model when establishing program goals. How to measure these goals to implement TQM methods is shown. Measuring student transformation as the central focus of a program promotes harmony among competing stakeholders and also provides a metric on which other program decisions (e.g., class size, assignments, and pedagogical technique) may be based. Different stakeholders hold surprisingly different views on defining program quality. The proposed framework provides a useful way to bring these competing views into a CPI cycle to implement TQM requirements of accreditation. The specific entrepreneurial learning outcome goals described in the tables in this article may also be used directly by educators in nonaccredited programs and single courses/workshops or for other audiences.