Hans Crijns

A new approach to testing the effects of entrepreneurship education among secondary school pupils

This papers aims to contribute to a better understanding of the effects of entrepreneurship education among secondary school pupils. Using a combination of retrospective pretest-posttest and self-perceived change measures, we assessed changes in entrepreneurial intent, creativity and attitudes towards entrepreneurs as a result of a variation of 21 entrepreneurship education programs among 3130 pupils in Flanders, Belgium. Furthermore, we grounded entrepreneurial intent in Shapero’s Entrepreneurial Event model and tested the impacts of the entrepreneurship perceived feasibility, perceived desirability and propensity to act. We find that the higher the intensity and experientiality of the entrepreneurship programs, the stronger their impact on some of the variables investigated. Furthermore, we found that the subjective evaluation of the program by the pupils had an even stronger effect on all investigated changes. As such, our findings highlight the importance of both objectively measurable program characteristics, as well as their subjective evaluation by the pupils in order to increase their effectiveness.

The Role of Learning in International Entrepreneurship

Learning theory suggests that organizations learn when the activities and experiences of individuals become assimilated into the routines, systems, and policies of the organization (Grant, 1996). A premise of study 1 is that the greater the attention a firm devotes to developing new knowledge and to exploiting existing knowledge, the greater its learning. This premise is consistent with prior theory which holds that the amount of information learned and the ease of its retrieval depend upon the intensity of effort expended in its acquisition (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990), and with the notion that a firms behavior can be envisioned as the pattern of effort and attention devoted to specific activities (Ocasio, 1997). The extent to which firms devote attention to learning in the international as well as domestic marketplace can be considered as critical outcome variables, and an important question pertains to how several factors affect this ‘learning effort.’