Work in Progress: Entrepreneurship in Education: Faculty Beliefs, Teaching Practices, and Student Learning

This work will present preliminary results from a study of entrepreneurship programs serving undergraduate engineering students. The purpose of the study is to examine questions relating to students' perceptions and understanding of entrepreneurship education. In addition, the study addresses faculty members' perceptions of entrepreneurship education including the critical skills and concepts that should be taught. To address these questions, we developed a study to better understand the faculty and students who are engaged in engineering entrepreneurship teaching and learning. Entrepreneurship program directors were asked to identify program faculty who were teaching in spring 2012. Faculty completed a comprehensive questionnaire about their beliefs and practices regarding entrepreneurship education, focusing on a specific course they were teaching in the spring 2012 semester. They were also asked to invite their students in this course to complete a questionnaire that asked students about their prior entrepreneurship experiences, familiarity with technology entrepreneurship concepts, and attitudes towards entrepreneurship. In addition, students were asked to indicate entrepreneurship resources they had used on their campuses. This study will provide systematic data from a variety of institutions about faculty who teach entrepreneurship and the students they teach. We expect that this knowledge will provide an important baseline against which future improvements in the field can be identified and assessed.