The Future of Education

Increasingly, the global economy is demanding that today’s schools teach young people not only hard skills, including digital literacy, STEM fields and other competencies, but also entrepreneurial skills that help them recognize and act on opportunities, critically solve problems and communicate effectively with others. However, unlike traditional entrepreneurship education that focused on business startup, the new approach emphasizes the need to instill an entrepreneurial mindset in youth irrespective of their eventual career choice. While efforts to promote this are being embraced globally – the EU established “a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship” as one of the key competencies for a knowledge-based society and since then has released an entrepreneurship competence framework (Margherita et al. 2016) – how to measure an entrepreneurial mindset and use data to build entrepreneurial awareness in the classroom is lacking. This paper delves into the NFTE research team’s findings of our innovative instrument, the Entrepreneurial Mindset Index (EMI), which we piloted in urban schools across the United States during the 2016-2017 school year. The EMI measures eight core domains that are critical to successful entrepreneurs, including future orientation, comfort with risk, opportunity recognition, flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-reliance, creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration. The EMI was developed by NFTE, an international entrepreneurship education program that operates in primary and secondary schools, in collaboration with researchers from ETS. The paper first provides details on the development of the EMI, a reliable and valid instrument that measures entrepreneurial mindset. It also examines EMI results that inform the impact of the NFTE program.  Our initial analysis suggests that students who demonstrate a strong increase in entrepreneurial knowledge also show growth in their entrepreneurial mindset. Our paper also demonstrates the applicability of the EMI in the classroom with teacher-facing reports that promote entrepreneurial awareness and facilitate learning. We believe that insights from innovative assessments like the EMI are central to evidence-based instruction and learning that will help classroom education remain relevant and future-oriented.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial mindset, 21^st century skills, growth mindset, entrepreneurship education, evidence-based learning, innovative assessments, soft skills;