In an educational setting it is vital that we as educators are able to assess our learning outcomes and effectively measure student progress towards those objectives. With that being said, what can educators do when they trying to instill a characteristic that they don’t know how to asses? The entrepreneurial engineering community is tackling this issue head on, as the increasing popularity of injecting an entrepreneurial mindset into the engineering curriculum has brought some of these “hard-to-assess” traits into the spotlight. 

While the KEEN framework has provided a valuable communication tool around which to organize discussion and facilitate action incorporating the entrepreneurial mindset into engineering curricula, it has also raised significant questions around assessment of the framework elements. The constructs captured by the framework are beyond the scope of what engineering faculty are accustomed to teaching and assessing. The abstracted and conceptually overlapping nature of the framework elements further worsens this discomfort. Having a fully vetted example of how the framework might be digested into defined, assessable pieces would be of tremendous value to the network. The purpose of this work is, therefore, to address the need for applied assessment of the KEEN Entrepreneurial Mindset and to explore how the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) VALUE Rubrics might fill these gaps.

The first goal for this work was to review the applicability of VALUE rubrics. The guiding research question for this phase was: Are the VALUE Rubrics applicable in regards to assessing the Entrepreneurial Mindset that KEEN promotes? Secondly, after this initial review, the rubric components deemed most applicable were extracted and the goal shifted to answering the question: How might the components of the VALUE Rubrics be reorganized around the elements of the KEEN Framework? Finally, after a thorough review of the resulting rubrics, the question again shifted to: How might these reorganized rubrics be modified and/or appended to better evaluate the KEEN Framework?

A set of three rubrics has been developed based on a modification of the sixteen VALUE rubrics, reframed to fit the KEEN Framework. As previously stated, there are gaps in each of the three rubrics, some with more than others. Work is still needed to distribute, revise, and polish the text of the rubric rows, as well as to evaluate gaps in the rubric coverage. Additionally, while direct application of these exemplars is not the intended use case, there are some faculty who may opt to do so. Significant work remains in terms of validation of the rubrics. While they have been developed from highly reliable and validated source material, some revalidation is necessary to ensure good reliability and applicability of the rubrics as redesigned. 

This work was initially presented at ASEE 2019, as part of the ENT division.