Fitting Kolb's learning style theory to entrepreneurship learning aims and contents.

• Author: Pfeifer, Sanja
• Position: Report

1. INTRODUCTION

   Entrepreneurship is a process by which individuals pursue opportunities beyond of the resources they currently control in an innovative, risk taking and proactive manner (Stevenson et al., 1990). Entrepreneurship has been associated with the smoothing of the market inefficiencies, increased employment opportunities, enhanced competitiveness and higher growth, cohesion and prosperity. Such effects attracted the institutional interest and support, and today entrepreneurship is a crucial part of any national or supranational strategy. The educational institutions are increasingly called upon to provide better and more educated enterprising individuals who will act as independent entrepreneurs, or who will be able to manage their careers or their lives in an entrepreneurial way.

   Entrepreneurship is perceived as behavior pattern (which is thought) that can be influenced from an early age through experiences, family, education, or cultural imprinting (Henry et al., 2005). Last decade entrepreneurship education has expanded within the education sector. The literature review indicates that entrepreneurship education programs are quite homogeneous in terms of content (Brush et al., 2003; Hytti and O'Gorman, 2004) and dispersed in terms of teaching pedagogy. Despite the consensus upon entrepreneurship as teachable, the models of successful entrepreneurship education delivery are rather elusive.

   After a brief description of entrepreneurship education goals, contents and expected outcomes, the paper explores the individual level of learning using experiential learning theory. Based on the theoretical input the paper investigates the individual learning styles of the students enrolled in the various programs on the different levels of the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Faculty of Economics in Osijek, Croatia (University of Osijek in continuation). Due to the infancy of the entrepreneurship education only a preliminary investigation will be presented. The main objectives of the preliminary research were exploring two basic issues: (i) Are there any differences in learning preferences/styles among cohorts of students on the bachelor and postgraduate entrepreneurship programs?; (ii) What implications does the Kolb's learning style inventory (LSI) have on the design of entrepreneurship education?

   Learning styles and stages are recognized as instrumental and manipulative from the individual and organizational point of view. Based on the theoretical and empirical evidence we propose the variety of learning methods that can be used to enhance entrepreneurship learning and expected outcomes.

2. ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION

   "Entrepreneurship education programme is usually defined as the process of providing individuals with the ability to recognize commercial opportunities

   and the knowledge, skills and attitudes to act on them." (Jones and English, 2004, p. 416) However, this definition emphasizes the professional skills and "how to" knowledge, that is essential for starting, managing and growing new business. Then again, the changing dynamics of environment and the way economies function today, have created the imperative for broader description of entrepreneurship education programme. Beside professional skills and knowledge entrepreneurship education should enhance more entrepreneurial attitudes in every individual, and more awareness about the benefits of entrepreneurship in the society.

   The academic institutions and their programs have been called upon to provide more substantial impact on developing and stimulating entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and attitudes/values. Entrepreneurship courses and programs started to appear during the early 1960s, predominantly in the U.S. Table 1 summarizes findings from the literature review regarding entrepreneurship education aims, content and expected outcomes.

   Despite the complexity of the educational aims and expected outcomes, there seems to be a consensus on the appropriate content of entrepreneurship education. On the other side, entrepreneurship teaching activities remain closer to craft. Fayolle (2008) stated that entrepreneurship pedagogy is more intuitively than systematic driven. Therefore, the innovative practice in teaching or learning pedagogy can be a next frontier in enhancing the complex field of entrepreneurship education.

   2.1. Entrepreneurship learning and experiential learning

   Survey on empirical studies of entrepreneurship (Gorman at al., 1997) indicated that entrepreneurship can be taught or at least encouraged by entrepreneurship education. Henry at al. (2005) also suggest that entrepreneurship is perceived as behavior pattern (which is thought) and therefore can be influenced from an early age through experiences, family, education, or cultural imprinting. Despite the consensus upon entrepreneurship as teachable, the models of successful entrepreneurship education teaching pedagogy are less clear and rather elusive. Literature review on the entrepreneurship education pedagogy reveals that entrepreneurship education should take the action-learning or experience oriented learning approach in order to increase the likelihood of effective entrepreneurship outcomes. The main challenge for entrepreneurship educators is to create the appropriate learning environment which reflects...