The Relationship between Undergraduate Students' Understanding of Experiential Learning and Entrepreneurship Skills in Shandong China

Abstract

One of the most important problems that higher education institutions are facing today is how to prepare the students with practical entrepreneurial skills, the traditional lecture-based methods only offer very little of the experiential learning. This mismatch is the reason graduates are not ready for working life. This research is aimed at exploring the relationship between undergraduates’ understanding of experiential learning and their levels of entrepreneurial skills. A correlational design with a quantitative approach, engaged 384 undergraduate students from eight universities in Shandong Province as the sample. A structured questionnaire was used to link the two constructs, namely, experiential learning and entrepreneurial skills. Pearson’s correlation and regression analysis used for the purpose of identifying the direction and degree of the relationship. The reported findings clearly highlight high correlation between experiential learning and entrepreneurial skills (r = 0.667, p < 0.001). The smaller the number of independent variables, the easier it is to estimate. The variance of entrepreneurial skills that can be explained by the variable of experiential learning is 44.5% (R² = 0.445), which is indicative of an effect of medium to large size. Indeed, the results support the strong link between experiential learning and entrepreneurial development. This outcomes suggests that the growth of the entrepreneurial skills comes not from theory but through experimental interactions. The findings of this study assert that the experiential theory of Kolb is still functional and practical, thus confirming the theory’s relevance to the current education. Hence, the suggestion for higher education institutions is to employ a more practical-based teaching approach so as to make a more equal match between the theory and practice in the new curriculum. Suggestions should be offered for future studies in the students’ other components of the learning process which might include attributes such as personal motivating qualities, the quality of the instructor, and the sociocultural environment.