Creating A Powerful Educational Experience For Entrepreneurship Students: A Model For Program And Curriculum Development

Programs focused on entrepreneurship (innovation, creativity, product development, etc.) demand and require students to operate at high levels of intellectual, social, and emotional maturity and sophistication. To promote students’ learning and performance, and to help students develop increasingly higher levels of development and sophistication, entrepreneurship programs must organize their curricula, programs, and services to create a coherent, meaningful, powerful educational experience for students. This paper provides a research-based approach, plan, and process for helping entrepreneurship programs make the vision become a reality at their institution. Introduction Building a successful entrepreneurship program involves more than creating and delivering a series of courses that meet accreditation or institutional requirements. Programs focused on teaching entrepreneurship demand and require students to develop sophisticated skills and abilities that cannot be developed in a single class or course, or, necessarily, in traditional classroom environments. In my experience as a program consult to entrepreneurship programs, I have found that while entrepreneurship and engineering programs are often innovative in using non-traditional approaches to teach engineering and entrepreneurship, the more rigorous demands of entrepreneurship education which must bring students to a particularly high level of ability and maturity can be more effective if delivered through a more coherent, seamless, educational experience for students. In this article I explain how faculty and program directors can utilize and apply curriculum development processes, student development theories, and Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning model to: (1) develop a curriculum that is tied to the P ge 11365.2 development of the student; (2) deliver each part of the curriculum utilizing the most effective instructional format; (3) optimally and seamlessly integrate campus programs and services, and business and community resources into the curriculum; and (4) build administrative and organizational structures that are consistent with and support the creation and implementation of innovative entrepreneurship programs. Curriculum Development Effective delivery of complex programs, such as entrepreneurship, should be done within the broadest context of goals and objectives. While individual instructors or student experiences may be addressing individual content areas and topics, all of these components must fit together to bring the student from their entering state to achievement of the desired program outcomes. One can look at this at three levels: a ‘micro’ level – the day-to-day program and course activities’ a ‘meso’ level at which curricular elements are linked to bring student understanding from a basic introductory level to full competence, and a ‘macro’ level over which students develop from their initial developmental level as entering students to the level at which they are expected to operate upon program completion. The ‘meso’ level demands an approach based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains, which organizes learning content into three domains– cognitive, (knowledge) affective (attitudes), and psychomotor (skills) 1 . Figure 1 presents a tabular representation of these three areas, and the appropriate sequence of developmental levels through which an individual must pass to reach the highest level of development. These developmental levels are ordered in levels of difficulty or sophistication. An important premise of Bloom’s taxonomy is that each category (level) must be mastered before progressing to Page 11365.3 the next. Students cannot skip stages of development. For example, in the cognitive domain, an individual must develop and progress through developmental level 1: Knowledge, and developmental level 2: Understanding, before they are able to effectively operate at developmental level 3 Application. One of the complexities of entrepreneurship education is that it is often the case that this sequence is violated, or the pace of delivery is so rapid, that students are not able to develop the prerequisite capabilities to fully master a topic or fulfill a desired outcome. Successful programs must structure their curricula to meet these demands. To develop an effective curriculum, one can utilize Bloom’s Taxonomy as a tool. Figures 2 through 4 lay out, for each of the three learning domains, the means to determine the level of development associated with each desired outcome, and should be applied to each content area and topic in the program. One can, for example, state desired outcomes in terms of action key words: execute, plan, write, etc. Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a set of appropriate key words for each of the domains and each developmental level. Having selected appropriate terms for each desired outcome, suitable performance tasks (i.e., assessment tools) can be selected to measure student performance against the identified student outcome. If students are successful in these measures, one can thus be assured that they have achieved the indicated developmental level. As this process is applied to the content areas and topics, one develops a learning progression by sequencing learning experiences from simple to complex and by expecting students to refine, apply, or utilize their knowledge, attitudes, and skills in new or different situation. It should be noted that students enter into any particular content area or topic with some basic level of ability (from none to mastery), and that in any Page 11365.4 individual learning situation (exercise, experience, class, course, etc.) there is also a developmental level that is the ultimate goal. For example, one might ask that students become only conversant in some topics, while full mastery is expected in others. This may also vary depending on the target population of students being considered; different student outcomes may be appropriate for students either entering with differing abilities, or who are part of different programs or majors or who have different post-graduate aspirations. Thus, the learning progression must account for the entering level of development and the desired level of development on completion of the activity. To develop a learning progression one completes a “content or task analysis.” 2 This identifies the critical aspects of learning and performing the content or task. For example, if the desired student outcome is for the student to be able to construct and present a business plan the student must have the knowledge, understanding, and ability to utilize and apply a variety of concepts such as business models, financial statements, profit forecasts, marketing concepts and strategies, and pricing. The student might also need to be able to utilize Excel to construct the financial statement and PowerPoint to present the business plan. A content or task analysis helps educators determine the prerequisite knowledge, skills, and basic elements of a task or activity. This information is useful in determining how to present and teach the task and how to assess students and evaluate their performance. 3 In summary, the process to this point proceeds through the following steps: 1. Construct student outcomes utilizing Bloom’s key works. Utilizing Bloom’s key works makes it easier to construct outcomes that are matched to the appropriate learning domains (execute = psychomotor, knowledge = cognitive, value = affective). Page 11365.5 2. Utilize Bloom’s key words to determine the developmental level for which the student outcome is written. Identify the developmental level at which students are expected to operate to successfully achieve the desired outcome by matching the key term to the outcome and then to the appropriate developmental level. 3. Identify all of the developmental levels, including the level at which the student will enter and the ultimate level to be reached to achieve the student outcome. 4. Create a learning progression that helps students move through the developmental stages necessary to meet the desired outcomes. 5. Choose performance tasks (ways to measure students’ performance) that are appropriately matched to the learning domain, student outcome, and developmental level students are expected to achieve. 6. Develop Proficiency standards for each performance task – Create rubrics, check lists, or written criteria describing standards of performance for each performance task. The standard may be a quantitative score students are expected to achieve (e.g., 80% on an exam); a qualitative measure describing a “good performance” by the student (e.g., comments/remarks from a review panel). Once these steps are completed the sequence of the curriculum can be developed. Sequence identifies the order in which topics are to be taught and the time (course, semester, year in the students’ educational experience) at which they are presented. This begins the ‘macro’ level of curriculum development. The sequence of a curriculum is determined by identifying the students’ prior knowledge and the developmental capabilities students need to possess to effectively learn and achieve the desired student outcomes. The curriculum is considered developmentally appropriate if the content or task is taught at a time and level of sophistication that matches students’ intellectual, emotional, and social maturity. 4 Student development has been studied extensively, and several of the primary theories that help to explain the development of college-age students include Erikson’s P ge 11365.6 Theory of Psychosocial Development, Chickering’s Vector of Development Theory and Perry’s Theory of Intellectual and Emotional Development 5,6 . These can be applied to : (1) understand students’ intellectual, emotional, social, and moral capacities, (2) choose appropriate teaching strategies to help students’ develop their capabilities, and (3) choose appropriate student outcomes th