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posted by janrinok on Monday December 26 2016, @07:24PM   Printer-friendly

The common thought that learning by experience is most effective when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship at university has been challenged in a new study.

An analysis of more than 500 graduates found no significant difference between business schools that offered traditional courses and those that emphasise a 'learning-by-doing' approach to entrepreneurship education.

The research challenges the ongoing trend across higher education institutes (HEIs) of focussing on experiential learning, and suggests that universities need to reconsider their approach if they are to increase entrepreneurship among their students.

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-entrepreneurial-textbooks.html

[PhD Thesis]: Evaluation of the Outcomes of Entrepreneurship Education Revisited

[Related]: College can cultivate innovative entrepreneurial intentions

[Source]: http://www.aston.ac.uk/news/releases/2016/december/entrepreneurial-experiences-no-better-than-textbooks-says-study/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:00PM (#446455)

    16 groups vs 600 students:

    That means you have to 'cluster' your standard errors by professor, reducing the statistical power of the sample, depending on the intensity of your intra-cluster correlation. For example if all students of a professor were 100% identical, it would be like having only 16 observations in your sample. Conversely, if you had no correlation between the professor and any characteristic of the students, you would have the full power of 600 observations.

    It looks like the author did not cluster her standard errors, leading to narrower standard (and potentially false positives), but to be perfectly frank I only say that based on a keyword search on 'cluster'; that thesis is an exasperating 416 pages.

    But clustering is not the only thing that threatens the internal validity of the research (forget external validity, it's not 'representative' of any population of schools and it does not appear to be its goal anyways).

    The main issue is that those results come from simple regressions. This means the experimental design does not allow the author to make claims about causal inference. With such a design, one cannot say that any effect observed is 'caused' by the exposure to the treatment (there could and most certainly is omitted variable bias for example, a major threat that often flips the signs of regression coefficients -- like finding that an effect is positive when in reality it's negative).

    Kinda sucks to be realistic with the statistical tools used (correlation does not imply causation here, find your obligatory XKCD). But the paper remains interesting exploratory research, and it looks like the author deserves to get funding to run an actual randomized controlled trial, or find other quaisi-experimental designs that have stronger claims to causality (such as RDD, my favorite); I know there are such papers in that field with such designs, but I don't know if any compare traditional and experience-based entrepreneurship courses.

    - An actual economist