Extracurricular One Day Competitions in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education – Theorising Effects

Abstract

This paper takes the popular but under-researched extracurricular format in school-based Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education - the one-day competition– as its focus. One-day competitions are frequently implemented in practice, with teachers’ surveys and national evaluations showing them to be the most common activity in schools. Yet one-day provision receives surprisingly little research attention in literature and implications of the competitive nature of activities are not meaningfully explored. More generally, current evaluation approaches in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education tend to be measurement-focused, which obscures crucial differences - between students, schools and program experiences - behind reports of average effect sizes. In this study, the perspective and resources of Realist Evaluation are used to provide a holistic and comprehensive theorisation of experiences and effects in one-day competitions in secondary schools. The contribution of this approach is twofold. First, it provides a much-needed elaboration of what can happen in one-day competitions, developing foresight with which to think through how effects are generated for different students in different contexts. Second, by applying Realist Evaluation to explore a familiar enterprise and entrepreneurship activity, with regards to impact evaluation approaches, this study shows the usefulness of complementing measuring with thinking.