Student engagement with team-based learning in undergraduate entrepreneurship courses: an exploratory study

Abstract

Student engagement in their courses has been demonstrated to be related to positive learning outcomes. Engaging students is particularly important in entrepreneurship education because of the complexity of entrepreneurship as an activity and field of study. Team-Based Learning has been identified as an effective teaching method for engaging students with course content in a range of fields of study. This paper describes the application of concept mapping as a research method to identify what undergraduate students understand to be engagement with the Team-Based Learning method in an entrepreneurship foundation course. This research identified themes of engagement across three separate deliveries of this course that were largely cognitive, and were generally in accordance with the dimensions of engagement employed in questionnaires used to measure engagement at the institutional and classroom level. The results have value in helping educators to further refine the effectiveness of this particular teaching method. The results also suggest areas for further research.