Dynamic entrepreneurship education: leveraging student learning through engaged assessment design

Introduction: While the pandemic forced essential changes to teaching practices across all universities, none more visible than the ubiquitous zoom class meeting, it also allowed experimentation to deepen knowledge exchange in volatile conditions. We developed a new peer assessment approach for both undergraduate and postgraduate entrepreneurship students that highlighted some interesting advances and barriers yet to be overcome. Aims: We expanded existing mixed assessment methods by adding a new facility for students to assess the work of their peers and, in so doing, to deepen their domain knowledge, practice entrepreneurial judgment and enhance transferable skills. The approach ought to generalize to other domains of practice beyond entrepreneurship. Methods: We adopted an action research approach, comparing marking outcomes from both academic facilitator and student peer assessors to gauge rubric validity and learning impact. Qualitative feedback provided an additional dimension for evaluating the efficacy of learning objectives and assessment validity. Results: The new peer assessment facility that was deployed invoked some intense exchanges among student teams and with academic staff in terms of fairness and validity, with evidence it sharpened engagement with downstream learning and assessment tasks. These exchanges informed new learning pastures not previously generated when ‘expert’ academic facilitators alone allocated assessment marks, highlighting the subjective nature of learning and the impact value of dynamic teaching practices under conditions of uncertainty. Discussion: Higher education seeks to instil a love for lifelong learning to solve emerging problems, not simply gaining the highest possible score for each assessment task as these may be set. While the pandemic was the catalyst for this practice shift, the benefits extend much further, evidencing learning impact as a function of cultivating domain engagement rather than aggregating ‘correct’ marks for ‘right’ answers to ‘known’ problems.