What is EntreAssess?

EntreAssess, formally known as Practical Entrepreneurial Assessment Tool for Europe (PEAT-EU), is a Erasmus+ project under key action 2 – Cooperation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices and especially the Strategic Partnerships in the field of Education, Training and Youth.

We are six partners in four countries – Iceland, Spain, Sweden and the UK – who develop practical assessment methods for entrepreneurship education (EE). Most of us have already worked on different European projects developing EE together before.

With this project, we want to gather knowledge and experience to develop a model of progression for assessment in entrepreneurship education across school levels. We believe that practical and easy-to-use assessment methods help to enhance students’ learning in EE and support the quality of education and outcomes in European contexts. Research shows us that teachers in EE have difficulties to identify entrepreneurial students and the Eurydice report (2016) acknowledges that assessment remains a challenge. That’s why we are collecting quality assessment methods – and they don’t just inform learners and teachers but also administrators, policy makers and society in general including parents and work-life.

Assessment in EE is a challenging area of work because it involves skills and real world connections that are not easily evaluated. Traditional assessment has been focussed on hard and measurable and comparable outcomes, at the expense of contextualised learning which is more suited for entrepreneurial education. Therefore teachers need support with their practice in EE in various ways – one important way is by having access to flexible, practical and academically-robust assessment tools!

The basic training and emphasis in EE promotes creativity and action (entrepreneurship). Through evaluation methods that are focused on competences, we can support learners to understand their own potential for creative thought and action, and teachers and facilitators can maximise their impact helping the learner progress.

EntreAssess will build on and develop results from earlier European projects and on the expertise of the partners. We draw, among other, on the work developed by the ASTEE project (Assessment Tools and Indicators for Entrepreneurship Education) and on the innovative work being carried out by the European Commission through the centralised development of EntreComp by DG Employment and the Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The focus of EntreAssess will be placed on a broad suite of practical assessment tools for classroom use.

The project runs from September 2016 to August 2018.

Svanborg R. Jonsdottir & Rebecca Weicht