Integrating Entrepreneurial Learning in Engineering Design Courses: Assessment of Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy

In our work-in-progress entrepreneurship education has become an essential element of engineering education in recent years, fostering the development of an inventive, entrepreneurial, and innovative workforce. Engineering entrepreneurship education is viewed as a way to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset and skills needed for a successful professional career. Universities and colleges provide a variety of entrepreneurial programming, including individual classes, certificate programs, minors, and majors, in an effort to incorporate entrepreneurship education into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. While these programs offer students several pathways to entrepreneurship education, a notable approach is to integrate entrepreneurship education elements with engineering design education. This approach exposes students to entrepreneurship education within the technical courses that are requirements of their undergraduate curriculum. Recognizing the role of self-efficacy (or confidence) as a significant characteristic motivating entrepreneurial intent and activity, we evaluate this approach's effect on students’ self-perceived entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) in their ability to accomplish entrepreneurial tasks (searching, planning, and marshaling). Using a pre-post research design, we sampled 32 paired biomedical engineering students enrolled in a senior design course at a large university located in the United States. Using paired t-tests, we found that these students’ ESE statistically and practically increased across Searching and Marshaling. Moreover, we examined students' ESE with regard to demographics and background taking into account gender and race/ethnicity in our analysis. Using an independent samples t-test for gender (men and women) and one-way ANOVA for race/ethnicity, we only found statistically significant differences in the pre- Searching task between men (n=16) and women (n=16), and in the pre- Planning task between men and women. These results suggest that students’ ESE increases after the course on specific entrepreneurial tasks. In addition, after the course there were no differences in ESE for all the entrepreneurial tasks across demographics which implies that students from different gender and race/ethnicity backgrounds achieved similar levels of ESE at the end of the course. The implications of the results on the development and execution of entrepreneurial programming for engineering students are discussed.