Abstract:

Over the last decades, educational, psychological and pedagogical researchers have long developed a set of scales in order to analyse, measure and evaluate different aspects (such as learning experience, study behaviour, academic performance, among others) of the students at different levels of education. The wide amount of scales and the huge quantity of proposed items make difficult both their management and use for specific applications.

This research is focused on the development of a multidimensional inventory based on the most valuable scales existing in the state-of-the-art. A new scale from which the entrepreneurial ability of the business university students could be evaluated, based on biographical, educational, psychological and pedagogical factors. So, the aim of this research is to design a new inventory of scales to assess business and management student’s capabilities prompting their entrepreneurial orientation.

From a detailed analysis and a refinement of the existing scales, this work proposes a theoretical approach to a new inventory by evaluating the abilities of the management and business administration students in order to develop those capabilities focused on entrepreneurial orientation. The developed inventory conceptually measures the distinct aspects concerning: personality dimensions (BFI, Big-Five Inventory, John, Donahue and Kentle, 1991; and HEXACO-60, Ashton and Lee, 2009), coping with stressful events (COPE inventory, Carver, Scheier and Weintraub, 1989), attention to study (OAS, Organization and Attention to Study scale, Kim, Newton, Downey and Benton, 2010), assessment of different aspects of student learning experience (CEQ, The Course Experience Questionnaire, Ramsden, 1991), study behavior (LASSI, Learning and Study Strategies Inventory, Weinstein and Palmer 2002), teaching influences (ATI, Approaches to Teaching Inventory, Prosser and Trigwell, 1999), students’ perceptions of a particular learning environment (IPSEE, Inventory of Perceived Study Environment Extended, Könings et al. 2008), motivation (AMS, Academic motivation scale, Vallerand et al., 1993; SDT, Self-determination theory of motivation, Ryan and Deci, 2000) and entrepreneurial orientation (Khandwalla, 1977; Miller and Friesen, 1982; and Covin and Slevin, 1989).

From this research the new INCORE-S (Innovation, Competitiveness and Networks Research Group Scale) inventory has emerged that will permit more valuable statistical analyses in future works on educational purposes in business university studies.

Keywords:

Educational scales, learning experience, study behaviour, academic achievement, entrepreneurial orientation.