Assessing the impacts of school entrepreneurial initiatives: A quasi-experiment at the elementary school level. - Chaire-réseau de recherche sur la jeunesse du Québec

Notice bibliographique

Pepin, M. et St-Jean, É. (2019). Assessing the impacts of school entrepreneurial initiatives: A quasi-experiment at the elementary school level. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 26(2), 273-288.

Résumé

The authors conducted a quasi-experiment between May and June 2017 to assess the entrepreneurial potential of students at Elementary Cycle 3 (10–12 years) in Quebec, Canada. Relying on attitude theory, the authors used Athayde’s Attitudes toward Enterprise for Young People test, which assesses students’ entrepreneurial potential through four entrepreneurial attitudes (leadership, creativity, achievement and personal control). The experimental group consisted of 11 classes which had conducted an entrepreneurial project during the 2016–2017 school year (n = 208 students), while the 7 classes of the control group had not (n=151 students).At first glance, data showed no difference between the two groups. Further investigation showed that private and Freinet (public) schools’ students, both from the control group, show significantly higher leadership scores than those of the experimental group. In-depth analyses also show that increasing the number of entrepreneurial projects significantly impacted three of the four attitudes assessed, although negligibly.Taken together, those results question the relevance of single entrepreneurial activities in developing students’ entrepreneurial attitudes. They also suggest the positive impact of a progressive, constructivist pedagogy in developing such entrepreneurial attitudes. Moreover, the paper raises several factors likely to impact students’ entrepreneurial attitudes for further research.