Upskilling Entrepreneurship Education: Deliberate Practice Standards, Cognitive Task Analysis, and Harnessing AI for Skill Development

Abstract

Despite advancements in entrepreneurship education, consistently developing students with the needed skills for doing entrepreneurship remains a challenge. This paper proposes the use of deliberate practice and cognitive apprenticeship pedagogical strategies supported by educational technologies to enhance skill development. An integrated process and methodology for establishing skill standards based on the task performance of expert entrepreneurs is introduced. The expert model is then used to create a deliberate practice GPT chatbot to provide real-time feedback to scale students’ skill development outside of the classroom. The approach demonstrates a framework that can be utilized by entrepreneurship education researchers and practitioners to improve what and how we teach to impact students’ entrepreneurial skills.

Keywords: Deliberate Practice, Cognitive Apprenticeship, Intelligent Tutoring System, Custom GPT, Skill Development, Entrepreneurial Skills, Cognitive Task Analysis