Empowering Youth through Entrepreneurship Education: Fostering Critical Thinking and Lifelong Learning through the Assessment Process

Youth agency encompasses the ability of adolescents and young adults to assert their autonomy and effect meaningful changes, spanning their personal spheres, local communities, and broader societal contexts. This entitlement inherently empowers young individuals to actively shape the course of their personal development trajectories. Aiming to ensure equal opportunity, access to the labour market, and inclusion, entrepreneurship competences can be considered as potential facilitators of youth agency. According to this, entrepreneurship education is focused not only on promoting the creation and growth of businesses but also on fostering sense of initiative (Blenker et al., 2011; Gibb, 1993, 2002; Hoppe, 2016), enabling learners to act on ideas and opportunities and turn them into financial, cultural, or social value for themselves and others. In fact, there has recently been a growth of educational programs on entrepreneurship worldwide, particularly within tertiary education institutions such as business schools (Kuratko, 2005; Mohamad et al., 2015) and non-business faculties (Solomon et al., 2002). Furthermore, entrepreneurship education has extended its reach to primary and secondary schools (Kyrö, 2015; Hoppe, 2016) as well as non-formal educational contexts (Debarliev et al., 2022), and informal educational contexts. To enhance economic performance and social cohesion, it is crucial to provide all citizens, especially those at higher risk of exclusion, with high-quality opportunities for formal, non-formal, and informal learning throughout their lifespans, alongside encouraging self-reflection to enhance their learning experiences. Acquiring the skill of learning to learn is a lifelong effort. Functioning as a substantial driver of transformation, in adulthood, it holds the capacity to augment employability and competitiveness (Sala et al., 2020). This capability can unleash transformative potential within both individuals and communities, thereby fostering societal well-being and facilitating adaptation to the dynamics of a swiftly evolving global landscape. A key competence emphasized across various European frameworks is critical thinking, encompassing awareness of one’s knowledge limitations and biases, as well as the capacity for creative thinking to generate novel ideas. In particular, critical thinking is encapsulated within the creativity skill in the “Ideas & Opportunities” domain of the EntreComp framework (2018); in the “Personal” domain of the LifeComp (2020); in the “Embracing complexity in sustainability” domain of the GreenComp framework (2022); and, finally, in the integration of “Dimension 4” of DigiComp 2.2 (2022) concerning interaction with A.I. systems. The present study aims to present a set of tools and instruments for the assessment and self-assessment of soft skills within entrepreneurship education environments characterized by informal learning and challenge-based learning pedagogical approaches. Specifically, a selection of tools tested and used to assess critical thinking will be highlighted, and several results will be shown to explore the role of this competence in guiding young individuals through transitions and in the search for individual trajectories.