Designed Action Sampling as a New Research Method to Help Build Active Communities in Entrepreneurial Education

Journal article, 2025

Entrepreneurial education (EE) is plagued by multiple vexing issues, such as unfocused impact studies, few pedagogical practices that work, infrequent scaling of good practice and passive single-case reliant communities. These issues have a stagnant effect on EE. What if they all have a single root cause? What if our efforts to see what works in EE have been hampered by limitations in established scientific methods? Designed action sampling is a new scientific method that combines action research, design science, experience sampling and critical realism. Teachers co-design action-oriented step-wise experiments that are then carried out by other teachers, who reflect in written form afterwards upon effects they see. Originally conceived in EE, the method has been used mostly outside EE by around 4,000 teachers and 36,000 students to form large communities around school development, vocational education and teaching in segregated areas. We investigate what problems can be solved in EE through this innovative design-based research method. Teacher communities in EE could adopt the new method to build more active communities that co-design, share, replicate and evaluate classroom level practices. This could reverse the stagnant effect of vexing issues in EE. Achieving this through research method innovation has not previously been proposed.