How to know if you did good job? Measure values you want to see altered. In general, all three of the subjects we evaluated – entrepreneurial attitude, English language skills and quality of exchanges of students – had positive changes as a result of participating in mobilities which also got very good feedback, both from students and teachers.
Entrepreneurial Assessment
When conducting Erasmus+ program, it is advisable to define some goals that will be measurable. In our case, we decided that we wanted to measure and achieve the positive shift in students regarding growth mindset and self-reliance – which are indicators of entrepreneurial attitude and tendencies – after participating in international project activities, exchanges of students. Students are given self-assessment cards at the beginning, at the end of the first year and at the end of the project. These questionnaires were made of 18 statements for which students had to decide how often they describe their attitude or behavior (offered answers were “always”, “usually”, “sometimes” and “never”). These questionnaires were handed out at the begging of the project and at the end of the first year to participating students, but also to students who participated in the last, virtual mobility (also before and after it). Questions are listed in the table below, as well as the change between percentages of students who marked these statements with positive values (“usually” or “always”) before and after participation.
| STATEMENTS/QUESTIONS | AT THE END OF THE 1ST YEAR | AFTER LAST VIRTUAL MOBILITY |
| Q1: If asked about what motivates me to succeed, I would say that the number one factor is a sense of personal fulfillment, that I gave my all and did my best. | INCREASED | INCREASED |
| Q2: I enjoy taking on challenges and getting to know new people. | INCREASED | INCREASED |
| Q3: I feel comfortable approaching people I have just met. | INCREASED | INCREASED |
| Q4: I have no problem setting clear goals and timelines for myself. | DECREASED | INCREASED |
| Q5: I listen and support other people’s ideas when working in a project. | DECREASED | INCREASED |
| Q6: If I see a problem coming, I do something about it now rather than waiting for it to happen. | INCREASED | DECREASED |
| Q7: If I am faced with a problem I try to solve it. | DECREASED | DECREASED |
| Q8: If there are several choices, I think carefully about each one of them before taking action. | DECREASED | INCREASED |
| Q9: I believe I can overcome obstacles. | DECREASED | INCREASED |
| Q10: While it may feel good to get praise from others and make them feel proud, what is most important to me is how I feel I did. | INCREASED | INCREASED |
| Q11: I look forward to being part of the Erasmus+ project, to contribute with ideas and do my best in every situation. | DECREASED | INCREASED |
| Q12: If finding myself in a conflict at school or at work – I set my personal opinions about a person aside to get the job done. | INCREASED | INCREASED |
| Q13: I think logically about what I am doing and what I am going to do when working on a task or project. | DECREASED | DECREASED |
| Q14: When someone disagrees with me, I try to deal with the disagreement instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. | INCREASED | INCREASED |
| Q15: I can see for myself what action needs to be taken; I do not depend on others to tell me when working on a project or task. | INCREASED | SAME |
| Q16: If one solution does not work, I try to find another when working on a task or project. | DECREASED | DECREASED |
| Q17: I am a person who contribute with many ideas to new projects. | INCREASED | INCREASED |
| Q18: When I start a task, I am confident I can complete it. | INCREASED | SAME |
It is important to mention that these differences in percentages were never extreme, they are in average 8-10%. For most statements, when number of students who gave positive answer decreased after mobility, percentages usually just slightly dropped, while increased positive feedback usually had bigger before/after deviations.
What we concluded was that, to some extent (more or less), participation in exchanges of students – both physical and virtual – had positive impact on students’ growth mindset and self-esteem.
Language proficiency test
English was logically official language of the project – it was used in project materials and common, international activities of the project, as well as for unofficial communication among participants. It is also foreign language that is taught in all four of partnering schools.
Because of that, we decided to measure potential improvements in English language skills among participants at the beginning of the project (when they were included in project activities), at the end of the first project year and at the end of the project. Group of students who participated in final virtual exchange took this test only before and after that activity.
These were the results:
Overall, charts show positive trends: for two students groups results were (basically) the same as before participation, while for the rest of the groups results of the last test were better compared to the first taken test.
Evaluation of Training Courses
Each Training Course Meeting was evaluated both by students and by teachers. Students got three sets of statements to which they could agree or disagree to different extent. One section was about workshops and second one regrading lectures. Statements were about expectations, level of lecturers’ preparation, clarity of the objectives, level of difficulty and usefulness of learned skills. Last one was the longest section and it was about students’ metacognitive perception of their skills improvement. Teachers got very similar questionnaires, but they had to fill it from a bit different perspective.
To mention once again, there were four training courses for students – in Sweden (February 2019), Italy (March 2019), Croatia (November 2019) and virtual mobility instead of one that was supposed to take place in Bulgaria (November 2020). First project training/meeting that was held Sweden in December 2018 for teachers was not included in these evaluations.
In order to give general grade to each mobility, students and teachers used descriptive scale: “Excellent”, “Very good”, “Good”, “Fair” and “Poor”. Overall, from students’ perspective, every exchange passed evaluation with great results, each got not less than 70% of answers “Excellent” and “Very good”, while first exchange, that was held in Sweden in February 2019, was liked the most – it got around 75% of “Excellent” and additional 15% of “Very Good” answers.
On the other hand, from teachers’ perspective, each exchange got at least 90% answers combined of “Excellent” and “Very good” grade, while training in Italy in March 2019 got from them the most of the “Excellent” grades in comparison to other training courses.
Mentoring Project 