Validating survey instruments to measure entrepreneurship education outcomes for undergraduate students

In the recent years, there has been an increase in the development of entrepreneurship education programs within undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. The inclusion of entrepreneurship related projects and courses offers students different pathways to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and skills essential for a successful professional career in a technology-driven economic landscape. To evaluate the impact of entrepreneurship education programs on student outcomes, it is critical to have valid and reliable assessment instruments. In this paper, we focus on validating assessment instruments to measure self-efficacy as a student outcome in entrepreneurship programming. Self-efficacy is a key outcome that reflects student's self-perceived confidence in their ability to perform certain tasks or demonstrate specific behaviors. Specific to entrepreneurship programming, we focus on three types of self-efficacy associated with student outcomes: entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), creative self-efficacy (CSE), technological self-efficacy (TSE). In entrepreneurship education literature, entrepreneurial self-efficacy is viewed as an important characteristic that reflects student's self-perceived confidence in their ability to perform various tasks associated with the entrepreneurship process. Along similar lines, creative self-efficacy outlines a student's belief in their own capacity to specifically perform creative tasks to realize their creative potential. Further, technological self-efficacy reflects a student's self-perceived confidence in their ability to utilize technology-related tools, which will allow them to perform successful technological tasks. For the assessment of the three outcomes, we utilize existing instruments from relevant literature. The validity and reliability of these instruments were examined for an upper-division entrepreneurship course using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and multiple reliability metrics respectively. We anticipate that this work can provide survey instruments that can be used for assessment in entrepreneurship education in STEM contexts. Future efforts and implications of this ongoing work are also discussed.