Recommendations on Assessment

Allocate more resources to assessment studies. Rigorous assessment studies are costly to perform, but their importance cannot be understated. Due to the importance of randomisation it is difficult to perform RCTs and when they also include qualitative methods they become very resource-intensive. It is very positive that the amount of resources allocated to initiatives in the field greatly been increased during the last decades. However, the resources allocated to implementation compared to research and assessment are very uneven. We therefore recommend that, as a minimum, 10 percent of the resources assigned to new educational initiatives within the field should be allocated to assessment.

Embed assessment into educational initiatives. As stated many times in this report, there are numerous ways to teach entrepreneurship. Different approaches will influence different types of pupils and students in different ways. Teachers typically know their students and pupils very well and know how to adapt different educational approaches to fulfill their particular needs. Many teachers are, however, inexperienced when it comes to entrepreneurship education and therefore unsure of their ability to equip their pupils and students with entrepreneurial competences and skills. It is important that they retain the freedom to adapt and alter best practices within the field so that these fit their particular pupils’ and students’ needs. Since it is difficult to assess entrepreneurial skills and competences with traditional evaluation methods, such as standardised tests, it is important that teachers use other types of evaluation tools to assess how they influence their pupils and students and whether or not their teaching has the intended effect. The assessment tools that were to be embedded and used by multiple educators on a regular basis need to be sufficiently detailed in order to capture differences in a large variety of teaching approaches and they also need to include the different levels that will influence the outcomes. The data collected by such a tool would offer us a fantastic opportunity to really increase our understanding of how a large variety of teaching approaches influence different types of pupils and students at different levels of education.

Embed Assessment in all levels and to all target groups. Assessment is crucial to evaluate students’ competences and skills but it is also crucial for teachers to assess the effectiveness of their entrepreneurial education activities in the classroom as well as for schools. School self-evaluation should be included in the overall assessment framework. This approach can support schools to monitor and adjust implementation of entrepreneurship education.

Develop coherent assessment and evaluation frameworks. New tools and criteria to help teachers in assessing entrepreneurial competences and skills – for both summative and formative purposes – are needed. Classroom-based formative assessments emphasize in-depth questioning and extended dialogues, self-and peer-assessment as well as feedback and guidance on improvement. Innovative approaches to summative assessment, such as portfolio assessments or ICT-based assessment allow learners to demonstrate complex skills and reasoning processes. Multiple measures of schools and learner achievement over time provide a better view of overall performance.

 Use ICT tools to improve and scale assessment practices. ICT technology has greatly improved the possibilities to create efficient and user-friendly assessment tools. The field is very complex and multiple outcomes need to be covered. It is therefore important that the existing tools are improved and that additional tools are created. In order to be able to efficiently develop user-friendly assessment tools it is necessary that the development team have competences in such varied field as education, research, statistics, design, programming, and knowledge about different types of users. Pupils and students at different levels of education have very different skill levels in language and technology which is necessary to consider when developing assessment tools. However, when users themselves are incentivised to use assessment tools it is significantly more doable to embed assessment into educational practice. This will considerably improve educational practice and further our knowledge about the effects and influence which different approaches have on different types of pupils and students.

Allocate more resources to research projects. Assessment studies are often limited to a particular programme and the room for experimentation and trying out new assessment methods is often limited. In order to further our knowledge about how different educational approaches affect different types of pupils and students it is important to perform comparative analyses. Research projects are typically not restricted to particular educational initiatives. This increase the flexibility of which questions can be asked and which methods and assessment tools can be applied. It is also important that evaluators get the time to really analyse the data. This typically requires dedicated research projects. We therefore recommend that universities and research centres should be included in development projects and that funding should be allocated to research in the field.