Assessing the assessment practices in entrepreneurship education in higher education

© Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, ECIE 2019. All rights reserved. This paper explores the current debates and issues of assessment practices in entrepreneurship education within the higher education context. While there has been considerable attention in literature dedicated to the teaching and learning of entrepreneurship in universities and entrepreneurship education more generally, there is, by contrast, a shortage of research on the assessment practices in entrepreneurship education. This shortage has been highlighted as a key area of concern. Assessment holds a crucial role in the successful delivery of any formal educational curriculum i.e. as a mean to ensure effective evaluation of learning, the assurance of educational standards, and motivating and progressing student learning. Given the importance of the role of assessment in higher education, questions remain as to how lecturers should assess students to promote optimum entrepreneurial learning. This paper seeks to begin to address this shortage in the field by developing a scoping review of the literature on assessment practices in entrepreneurship education within the higher education context. As the literature landscape in this field appears to be relatively recent and unexplored, a scoping review is considered as an ideal way to systematically identify the breadth of literature, clarify boundaries and definitions, and identify gaps in research evidence. There are three main research questions: (1) what is the extent of published evidence on assessment practices in entrepreneurial education delivered in higher education?; (2) what is known from the existing literature about the use and impact of such practices in promoting entrepreneurial learning?; and (3) What are the gaps in the knowledge base in this emerging field?. By addressing these questions, the outcomes of this review would identify and summarise key concepts in the field, and offer a platform on which further debates and developments may be made. Results of this study include both a descriptive numerical summary of the published studies on assessment practices as well as a thematic analysis based on the research questions.