Abstract:

Assessment is recognised as a critical part of any learning process. It allows us to identify the knowledge and skills that we currently hold, the future outcomes that we want to achieve, and finally it helps us to monitor our progress toward achieving these outcomes. Assessment permits interaction between activities, educators and students that can help facilitate learning through a continuous cycle of participation, performance review and adjustment. As a mechanism for feedback, assessment helps to ensure a consistent and equitable quality of educational provision that can provide all students with the possibility to fulfil their potential. Traditionally in entrepreneurship education we have been more concerned with finding a clear and coherent definition of the learning area itself and offering recommendations surrounding pedagogical tools for content delivery. It is quite understandable then that there has been less focus on how best to evaluate the progress of our students. In our reflection piece we choose to engage with this extremely important and timely issue through outlining useful ways that we can assess students in the context of an entrepreneurial classroom. To do so, we reflect upon our own experiences as entrepreneurship educators and extract specific assessment for learning strategies that we have implemented at undergraduate level within a specific unit of work related to the development of an entrepreneurial mindset. Our conclusions reiterate the belief that students do not learn what we teach yet instead need to be provided the opportunity to understand, retain and apply their knowledge and skills. Our suggestions can be of use for both new and experienced entrepreneurship educators.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship, Assessment, Evaluation, Feedback, Progress.