Modifying the VALUE Rubrics to Assess the Entrepreneurial Mind-set

In an educational setting it is vital that we as educators are able to assess every relevant characteristic/trait that our students may convey in the classroom. With that being said, what can educators do when they come across a characteristic that they don’t know how to asses? The engineering entrepreneurship community is tackling this issue head on, as the increasing popularity of injecting an entrepreneurial mindset into the engineering curriculum has brought some of these “hard-to-assess” traits into the spotlight. A significant driver in broadening interest in this space has been KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network), a network of institutions committed to making entrepreneurship a core element of the engineering curriculum. While the KEEN Framework, commonly referred to as “The 3Cs”, has provided a valuable communication tool around which to organize discussion and facilitate action incorporating entrepreneurship into engineering curricula, it has also raised significant questions around assessment of the framework elements. Much of the existing effort has focused on survey instruments as the primary mechanism of mindset assessment, with much less work being done in the area of direct, applied assessment at the course level. In a parallel space to the entrepreneurship world, the American Association of Colleges and Universities developed a set of rubrics, the VALUE Rubrics, to assess similarly abstract elements such as critical thinking and intercultural knowledge. The type of mindset and additional attributes assessed by the VALUE Rubrics closely parallels the type of attributes commonly discussed in connection with the entrepreneurial mindset. This work aims to explore this connection further. A full review of the VALUE rubrics has been conducted and the constituent rubric elements reorganized, modified, and repackaged in the form of three new rubrics centered around the KEEN 3Cs of curiosity, connections, and creating value. While much remains to be done in terms of assessing reliability and validity of the modified rubrics, the end result as presented in this work provides a promising starting point for future efforts in direct assessment of the entrepreneurial mindset.