Assessing the Impact of Enterprise Education in Three Leading Swedish Compulsory Schools

Abstract

An impact assessment of enterprise education was conducted by studying a Swedish policy initiative. Eighty‐three students, 10–16 years old, were followed longitudinally for one semester in three schools deemed to be leaders in enterprise education. An innovative research methodology was used based on app‐based experience sampling, interviews, and a novel definition of enterprise education. Entrepreneurial dimensions in the three schools were rare, with few students developing entrepreneurial competencies. Swedish policy pressure for enterprise education has thus had a weak impact. Implications include novel pedagogical recommendations to enterprise educators and a call for more research employing the applied innovative research methodology.

Notes

Due to limited space here, the complete list of codes and working definitions used when coding is not given here. They can, however, be seen in a summarized form in Table 3. A detailed list of the codes is available upon request to the corresponding author.

The 30 people consisted of 14 researchers involved in different aspects of enterprise education, five project managers of enterprise education, one school manager deeply involved in enterprise education, four consultants in enterprise education, and two concept providers in enterprise education.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Lackéus

The authors wish to thank participating teachers and students for their generosity in sharing their data with them. The authors also wish to thank Swedish National Agency for Education for partly funding this research.

Carin Sävetun

Martin Lackéus is a PhD in entrepreneurial education from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

Carin Sävetun is CEO of Me Analytics AB.