Evaluating and promoting competencies for social entrepreneurship in university subjects

Abstract

Universities, as well as several scientific and academic entities, both nationally and internationally, have become aware of the need to promote entrepreneurship in the university sphere (UNESCO, 2009; Guerrero, Urbano, Ramos, Ruiz-Navarro, Neira y Fernández-Laviada, 2016). This paper presents a tool that is useful for evaluating the skills for social entrepreneurship in any university subject. Two versions of the tool have been made (students and educators) that allow analysing and assessing the degree to which these competences are worked on in a specific subject. In addition, the educator’s version is designed to promote reflection in the faculty on the margin of improvement of each of the entrepreneurial skills and encourage the implementation of concrete proposals to integrate them into short-term subjects. The tool, in its two versions, named "Register to Evaluate Social Entrepreneurship in the University Classrooms” (RESAU), has been validated by 14 experts. In the case of the student version, a statistical validation has been carried out in the a pilot sample of students of Economic Sciences and Educational Sciences (n = 180), from the universities of Granada, Malaga and Seville. In the case of the students' version, the tool shows to what extent the competences for social entrepreneurship are worked on in the classroom activities. In the educator's version, the tool adequately illustrates those competencies for social entrepreneurship that are worked on in each subject and those that have a margin of improvement that can be developed by each educator. The conclusions of the work highlight the relevance of working skills for social entrepreneurship in university classrooms and highlight the way in which each educator proposes improvement strategies.