Department Chair

Dr. Steve Macho

Date of Award

5-2021

Access Control

Open Access

Degree Name

Business and Marketing Education, M.S.Ed.

Department

Educational Foundations Department

Advisor

Dr. Steve Macho

Department Home page

Career & Technical Education Department

First Reader

Dr. Steve Macho

Second Reader

Dr. Wendy Paterson

Third Reader

Suzanne Zewan

Abstract

To extract the evidence of the effect of project-based learning in the teaching of entrepreneurship at International Preparatory in the City of Buffalo, the researcher will work with two groups of students. One group of students hereinafter called Group A will be exposed to the course of entrepreneurship using the project-based learning golden standards and teaching practices recommended by the Buck Institute of Education and the second group, hereinafter called Group B will not include project-based learning as a teaching strategy. Of special interest is the notable effect on the students’ desire to want to open and operate a business as an entrepreneur. In addition, the paper seeks to identify ways in which the students in Group A apply 21st Century skills of critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication as an integral part of using project-based learning. The paper will consist of a literature review to find out what the experts in the field have proven through research and experience in regard to the use of project-based learning as a strategy for the teaching of entrepreneurship. Curriculum content will be designed to cover a period of one semester, three units, namely, entrepreneurship, principles of marketing and sales. This content will be presented using project based learning from the beginning of the semester during which the students in Group A will be asked to work on the challenging question of what good or service they want to create or provide for sale to potential customers. Students in this group will proceed during the first few weeks of the semester with a sustained inquiry until they come up with the product or service they will create or obtain from an established supplier. Implementation of project-based learning to the teaching of entrepreneurship will consist of providing students the opportunities to identify their product or service and move forward to the selection of effective modes of packaging, promotion, advertising, sale and distribution of the product or service. The students will also create a written business plan which will outline how their business will be organized and operated. The students will then be directed to work on their final presentations which will be revised, improved, and critiqued for continuous improvement. The research design will continue with a comparative statistical analysis of the two groups: Group A and Group B. Group A will be the group that will be using project-based learning in the teaching and learning about entrepreneurship, while Group B will be the group that will be doing the course without project-based learning. The purpose of studying the two groups is to establish whether there is a connection between the desire to want to become entrepreneurs when project based learning is implemented to the course content and to observe the 21st Century skills as the learners work on creating or providing a good or a service to customers. Finally, the research design will allow for data to be gathered from the students of Group A to conclude which aspect of the curriculum content they found to be most helpful. The purpose for doing this is to establish which segment helped the students the most and to establish the need for emphasis on that segment for future experiments of this nature.

Comments

The use of project-based learning as a teaching strategy for business education

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