Enhancing Creative Problem-Solving and Social-Emotional Learning through an Entrepreneurship Education Training Programme: An Exploratory Action Research

Entrepreneurship training is conceptually tied to creative problem-solving (CPS) and social-emotional learning (SEL) thanks to its emphasis on innovation and pragmatism. Amidst the long-standing and well-publicized shortfall in creativity and interpersonal competencies amongst secondary schoolers in Hong Kong, our team intended to, via the present pilot action research project, gauge the impact of a self-developed Entrepreneurship Education (EE) training programme on elevating both the CPS and SEL amongst a group of local secondary students. Five 2-hour, face-to-face, EE training sessions were implemented in a Hong Kong secondary school from February to April 2023. Several training sessions incorporating a host of EE elements, including the Design Thinking process, team building, applications of business model(s), pitching and experiential learning in an authentic context (i.e., a business pitching contest followed by a campus-wide exhibition fair), were featured. The flipped classroom pedagogical approach was also incorporated to enhance activity-based learning and student engagement. A mixed- method evaluation framework was adopted to evaluate the impact of this initiative. Besides administering a set of questionnaires tapping into various indicators of student participants’ CPS and SEL (e.g., empathy, leadership, entrepreneurial passion, and competence etc.) before and after the training, our team also conducted semi-structured focus group interviews with students and teachers involved to solicit their perception of the training. Despite its exploratory nature, the present initiative constitutes a pioneer endeavor in the local secondary school context to utilize EE in promoting CPS and SEL. Discussions pertaining to the major findings and implications are also featured in this presentation.