Introduction Over the last decade, the number of university programs that focus on imbuing students, especially engineering students, with entrepreneurial skills have increased dramatically 1. Research tells us that it is possible to... more
Introduction Over the last decade, the number of university programs that focus on imbuing students, especially engineering students, with entrepreneurial skills have increased dramatically 1. Research tells us that it is possible to significantly increase student ability in content areas relevant to entrepreneurship through well planned educational interventions 1–4. However, one challenge faced by entrepreneurship programs is establishment and agreement on comprehensive and well-validated assessment instruments. A meta-analysis by Purzer et al. 5 found 51 different instruments in 29 journal and conference papers that focus on entrepreneurship. Most of these instruments evaluate entrepreneurship as a multidimensional characteristic. They use varying approaches designed to measure knowledge, skills, and psychological characteristics. Purzer found that while 67% of the instruments focus on skill assessment, only 27% focus on attitudes toward entrepreneurship. This suggests a gap on assessment instruments that explore the mindsets that students use to employ their newfound skills. The skills component of entrepreneurship is a logical focus of entrepreneurship education. Tracking students' growth in knowledge areas provides relevant data tracking entrepreneurial learning and ability. However, attitude components theorized to map to entrepreneurially relevant behaviors comprise an interesting area of study. Attitude characteristics supplement skill-based assessments by identifying specific orientations or responses that are tied to the use of entrepreneurial knowledge. Attitude approaches may allow for a more complete exploration of entrepreneurship education phenomena including the self-selection phenomenon noted within many optional entrepreneurship programs. This paper presents a study of the validity of one such instrument. The study makes use of a modified version of the entrepreneurial attitudes orientation instrument (EAO) developed by Robinson 6. The EAO instrument has established a fairly wide base of use 6–8 as a method of discretizing entrepreneurship characteristics, especially in students. However, the instrument's original development population was not students and little evidence of validity on student populations have been reported. The shift to student populations was explicitly warned against by the instrument's original author 9. The entrepreneurship education field has an overall lack of strong evidence of validity studies on assessment instruments of this type. The lack of focus on validity evidence in entrepreneurship research is a concern specifically noted by Purzer 5 This study presents a methodical assessment of validity evidence for the EAO instrument on student populations. The paper details the background of the instrument, entrepreneurship assessment in general, as well as techniques for psychometric validation. The method section details the modifications and specific approach undertaken for data collection. The results section details the analysis results from confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the study dataset. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study's results, the overall conclusions as to validity, and a discussion of the implications for future work on this instrument and population.
