Preliminary Efforts to Define, Assess, and Improve Students’ Ability to Make “Connections” as Part of Developing an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Work in progress (research-to-practice). The entrepreneurial mindset, as articulated by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network or KEEN, rests on a foundation of three “C”s - Curiosity, Connections, and Creating value. In prior work, we developed an approach to assess students’ situational curiosity in response to class activities. We discovered that the creation of real artifacts excited student curiosity and explored the extent to which open-ended problem solving did as well. We have also proposed rubric-based assessments of student designs as a measure of value-creation. The second of the three “C”s, connections, has presented assessment challenges to this point.In this work, we discuss our literature review and search for valid and reliable instruments and subscales for connections. We propose a “2I” model where connections is defined as the ability to “integrate” knowledge to provide “insights”. We also propose an in-class activity similar to a brainstorming exercise already in use in many design-based courses. We have developed a rubric for assessing results of this exercise that can be used to both assess participants’ facility with forming connections and as the basis for a conversation with students about how to make more meaningful connections. Further, faculty can use this activity to stimulate students’ idea generation about course topics. We have tested this approach in two settings, and find initial results promising. We continue to seek feedback from the community as we work to turn this into a valid and reliable instrument for the assessment of connections through the “2I” model.