Identifying teaching methods that engage entrepreneurship students

Abstract

Purpose

Entrepreneurship education particularly requires student engagement because of the complexity of the entrepreneurship process. The purpose of this paper is to describe how an established measure of engagement can be used to identify relevant teaching methods that could be used to engage any group of entrepreneurship students.

Design/methodology/approach

The Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) instrument was used to provide 47 well established engagement criteria. The results from 393 students (33 per cent response rate), and the identification by immersed experts of the criteria that were present in each of six teaching methods, made it possible to calculate a weighted score of engagement contribution for each teaching method.

Findings

This method described in this paper identified, for undergraduate entrepreneurship students, the most engaging teaching methods as well as the least engaging. This approach found that from amongst the particular range of teaching methods in the courses in this case study, poster reports was the most engaging, followed by a team‐based learning method. This approach also identified one teaching method that was not engaging, suggesting it could be discontinued.

Practical implications

These results give entrepreneurship educators with access to engagement data collected by the National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE), or the equivalent AUSSE study, a practical method for assessing and identifying teaching methods for student engagement for their particular profile of students, and in their particular teaching situation.

Originality/value

The application of established measures of engagement is novel and provides insights into specific teaching methods for enhancing the engagement of particular groups of students at the course level. It is a method that could be applied in fields other than entrepreneurship education where NSSE or AUSSE data is available.

Citation

Balan, P. and Metcalfe, M. (2012), "Identifying teaching methods that engage entrepreneurship students", Education + Training, Vol. 54 No. 5, pp. 368-384. https://doi.org/10.1108/00400911211244678