Research on Strategies of Information Technology in Cultivating Students’ Innovative Thinking and Practical Ability in Entrepreneurship Education
Online veröffentlicht: 24. März 2025
Eingereicht: 30. Okt. 2024
Akzeptiert: 23. Feb. 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/amns-2025-0725
Schlüsselwörter
© 2025 Fengjin Zhou, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Information technology education refers to the cultivation of students’ information technology knowledge and skills in schools to help them adapt to the development needs of the information society. With the progress of science and technology and the development of society, information technology has become an indispensable part of modern society [1-4], and in the field of entrepreneurship education, the application of educational informatization technology has also increasingly become a hot spot of research, and the importance of information technology education has also become increasingly prominent [5-7].
For the entrepreneurship education of college students, the theory of entrepreneurship as well as practical activities is the weakest link, and the development of entrepreneurship practical training can gradually allow students to gradually transition from theoretical learning to real entrepreneurship [8-10]. Colleges and universities should make use of information technology, through the development of simulation platform suitable for practical training of college students, and constantly improve the entrepreneurial ability of students, so as to enhance the chances of entrepreneurial success. And entrepreneurship education plays a crucial role in the cultivation and development of students’ innovative thinking and practical ability [11-14]. By providing a platform for cultivating students’ innovative thinking, fostering entrepreneurial spirit, practicing opportunities and resources, interdisciplinary cooperation, and cultivating independent learning ability [15-17], entrepreneurship education can help students develop excellent innovative thinking and practical ability, and lay a solid foundation for their future development. Therefore, innovation and entrepreneurship education should be an important part of education reform to promote the development of innovative thinking and practical ability of more students [18-21].
Based on traditional teaching methods, this paper aims to design and integrate resources using information technology to complete information-based entrepreneurship education. According to the study of the problems in innovation and entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities, it integrates the depth of modern information technology and entrepreneurship education, and puts forward two major cultivation strategies of creating an informatized classroom and an extracurricular informatized environment. The relevant questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS analysis software to explore the relevant factors that affect the innovative thinking aspect of students. Using the experimental research method, the works and achievements of students in the experimental class and the control class were compared and analyzed to discuss whether the students’ innovative thinking and practical ability had changed significantly before and after the experiment.
College students are the future of the country. Whether they have the consciousness and ability to innovate and entrepreneurship has a great influence on the development of national innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation is an important symbol of a country’s prosperity and development, and innovation and entrepreneurship education for college students is necessary for current national development. With the continuous improvement of China’s education level, China’s college graduates show a large-scale climbing trend, and the corresponding jobs do not increase with the increase in the number of college graduates, which causes the problem of difficult employment of college graduates. In order to get a satisfactory job in such a competitive environment, students need to have strong innovation and entrepreneurship ability, which also determines that colleges and universities must pay attention to the education of innovation and entrepreneurship consciousness of college students, and build the core curriculum of innovation and entrepreneurship education under the background of information technology environment.
Outdated knowledge system and single teaching methods At present, many colleges and universities in the process of innovation and entrepreneurship skills education, still using the traditional teaching knowledge system and methods, can not meet the needs of the times, can not meet the requirements of the modern society on the ability of talents, the relevant educational content is not timely updated and improved, the teaching methods are single and backward, failing to keep abreast of the times, which affects the effect of the development of innovation and entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities. Weak teacher strength in colleges and universities Innovation and entrepreneurship education involves a lot of contents during the period of carrying out, has strong comprehensive and diversified characteristics, and has more strict requirements for teachers’ professional ability and business quality. However, in many colleges and universities, the comprehensive ability of teachers of innovation and entrepreneurship education is not high, the structure of the teaching team is not perfect, there is a lack of high-quality teaching talents, and the professionalism and innovation and entrepreneurship ability of some teachers are poor, which has a greater impact on the quality and effect of the relevant education work. Lack of good innovation and entrepreneurship environment To improve students’ innovation and entrepreneurship ability and ensure the effect of innovation and entrepreneurship education, colleges and universities must be able to create a good innovation and entrepreneurship atmosphere in conjunction with the development of education to help students understand and pay more attention to facilitate the effective cultivation of their ability in this area. However, the innovation and entrepreneurship atmosphere in many colleges and universities is not strong, the infrastructure and equipment are not perfect, and the relevant system is not sound, so it is impossible to realize the correct guidance for students, thus affecting the enthusiasm of students’ participation, and not able to drive students to further development.
The integration of modern information technology and innovation and entrepreneurship education is deeply rooted in the following aspects, as indicated in Figure 1 below:
Integration system of innovation and entrepreneurship education
The in-depth integration of modern information technology and teaching work in colleges and universities is to make full use of the advantages of modern information technology for the teaching of knowledge in various professional disciplines, which is characterized by systematization, scientization and specialization. In this process, the effective integration of advanced teaching concepts is realized, and the efficient use of information technology centered on the Internet is realized. Allow college students to learn and explore independently with the help of various tools and software, create a good teaching environment and learning atmosphere, effectively demonstrate the role of various tools and software in education and teaching, and realize the comprehensive integration of various teaching resources and elements to carry out systematic teaching, laying the foundation for the integration of modern information technology and innovation and entrepreneurship education. A set of specialized and targeted talent cultivation modes that can meet the development needs of modern society and realize the efficient use of network teaching resources.
Through investigation, analysis, and practical research, two major enhancement pathways were summarized, and students were able to realize the enhancement of their own innovative and creative abilities, both in and out of the classroom.
Creating an in-class informatization environment with distinctive local characteristics and a strong cultural flavor can not only cultivate students’ sentiment, enrich and optimize students’ personality, but also cultivate students’ innovative sentiment and innovative and creative ability in an invisible way. From the in-class experiment, we know that students’ innovative and creative ability depends on the open informationized teaching mode, which is mainly embodied in the teaching means adopted by teachers, the way of students’ learning and the assistance of network multimedia in the whole teaching process, etc., which also explains the necessity of the construction of intelligent education and intelligent classroom. In addition, the evaluation scale used in the experiment shows that adopting a variety of evaluation methods can more comprehensively understand the ability level of students. Therefore the derived pathway for classroom innovation and creativity enhancement is shown in Figure 2:
Ways to improve classroom innovation and creativity The curriculum, as the core of school education, plays a key role in the cultivation of innovative and creative talents, and for secondary vocational colleges and universities it is to bring out the characteristics of vocationality. Therefore, the school curriculum is constantly adapting to the current information age and is gradually meeting the needs of society and student development. Schools combine their actual situation to expand the channels of information input, so that students can receive new ideas, theories and methods from the outside world in the first time, thus arousing their creative resonance and strengthening the activities of creative thinking and the practice of creative techniques. The introduction of information technology equipment can meet the requirements of diverse courses, enhance the content and quality of courses, and motivate students’ enthusiasm for classroom learning. The improvement of students’ innovative and creative abilities cannot be separated from the construction of smart education and smart classrooms. Smart education, or education informatics, refers to the comprehensive and in-depth use of modern information technology in education to promote the process of educational reform and development. Its technical characteristics are digitalization, networking, intelligence, and multimedia, and its basic features are openness, sharing, interaction, and collaboration.
In addition to improving students’ innovative and creative abilities through classroom activities, students also improve their abilities through a variety of ways outside of the classroom. According to the research, it can be understood that the cultivation and improvement of students’ innovative and creative ability is based on a strong innovative education atmosphere, such as the national and social emphasis on innovative education, innovative activities carried out by the school and so on. The part of extracurricular experiments shows that the improvement of students’ innovative and creative ability depends on the design of innovative and creative works outside the classroom, and students can learn and create more conveniently by joining the cloud classroom, and the tripartite evaluation through the network enables students to evaluate each other’s works and learn from each other. These reflect the combination of a network platform, innovative work activities, and multiple evaluation mechanisms, which greatly improves students’ innovative and creative abilities. Combined with the application of modern information technology, thus proposing the way to improve the innovative and creative ability outside the classroom is shown in Figure 3:
Ways to improve extracurricular innovation and creativity ability The state and the government can provide policy guarantees and financial support to encourage and strengthen informatization innovation education; schools, as the main body of implementing education, support and encourage students’ exposure to informatization innovation education; enterprises, social organizations and the media can provide practical informatization platforms and cultural support. Carrying out innovative and creative activities helps to cultivate innovative and practical awareness as well as innovative and creative ability, and the use of network platforms to organize and carry out competitions can not only save costs and accommodate a large amount of information, but also attract students with diversified publicity methods, which is easier for students to accept. The cultivation of innovative and creative ability needs to pay attention to the evaluation of students, although the cultivation of innovative and creative ability requires students to have corresponding knowledge and skills, but a single evaluation of knowledge and ability is not conducive to the cultivation of innovative and creative ability, and it is difficult to evaluate students’ diverse innovative and creative ability, complex skills and personality.
According to the questionnaire survey on the aspect of innovative thinking used in the practical observation and experiment. Two classes of students (totaling 90) from a college in J city were used as experimental subjects, questionnaires were distributed, and the survey data were statistically analyzed using SPSS. The results of the survey are shown in Table 1. It is often said that interest is the best teacher, and most of the students are still very interested in the study of information technology entrepreneurship education courses, and they think that information technology has some attraction for them. For the first question “Are you interested in learning information technology in your daily life and study?” The number of people who chose interested and more interested accounted for 67.29% of the total number of surveyed. The increase in interest can improve the ability to think creatively.
Interested in information technology
| Serial number | Selected item | Selection number | Proportion |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Interest | 32 | 29.91% |
| B | Comparative interest | 40 | 37.38% |
| C | General | 32 | 29.91% |
| D | Disinterest | 3 | 2.80% |
Regarding the question “Have you ever taken the initiative to learn information technology?”, the results are shown in Table 2. As shown in Table 2, 36.45% of the students chose “often”, 41.12% chose “occasionally”, and 22.4% chose “indifferent”. From the results of the survey, it can be seen that students have not yet formed the attitude of active learning of information technology, and the number of active learning is relatively small. This is mainly because teachers and students do not pay enough attention to information technology and do not develop good learning habits, which is also one of the problems that need to be emphasized by teachers in the practice of entrepreneurship education. Research has shown that the degree of mastery of information technology has an important impact on the innovative thinking ability of entrepreneurship education.
Information technology mastery degree and innovation thinking culture
| Factors of information technology mastery | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Serial number | Selected item | Selection number | Proportion |
| A | Often | 39 | 36.45% |
| B | Occasionally | 44 | 41.12% |
| C | No | 24 | 22.40% |
| Factors of innovative thinking culture | |||
| A | Strong | 6 | 5.61% |
| B | Stronger | 16 | 14.95% |
| C | General | 42 | 39.25% |
| D | Worse | 43 | 40.19% |
The cultivation of innovative thinking occupies an important position in the teaching of entrepreneurship education, so the author has also conducted a relevant investigation on this issue. In the survey, when students were asked, “Do you think you have a strong creative mindset?” A total of 20.56% chose “strong” or “strong”, 39.25% chose “average”, and 40.19% chose “poor”, which proves that the current classroom is still weak for the cultivation of students’ innovative thinking ability, and it is necessary to pay more attention to this aspect in future teaching practice.
This paper examines the advantages of applying information technology to entrepreneurship education through a teaching experiment. The experimental group adopts the information technology entrepreneurship education method, while the control class still uses the conventional teaching mode. The specific teaching content is as follows:
Take students’ practical operation as the main focus, and teachers guide and stimulate students’ innovative thinking ability and explore students’ potential. Optimize students’ information technology knowledge structure system, enhance students’ innovative thinking and ability. Strengthen students’ innovative thinking and ability training, and further develop students’ creativity. Focus on teaching evaluation to enhance students’ sense of achievement in innovative thinking.
The purpose of this experiment is to conduct a preliminary test of the effectiveness of the previously proposed strategy of information technology on the cultivation of innovative thinking and ability through experiments, and to provide a basis for the cultivation of students’ innovative thinking and ability in practical teaching. This experiment takes two classes of students (totaling 90) in a college in J city as the experimental subjects, and the two groups are randomly selected to be determined as the experimental class and the control class. The precise method involves creating a questionnaire that is based on the Williams Creativity Measurement Scale. Secondly, the questionnaire was distributed evenly and recovered by class, and the questionnaire answering time was controlled to 10 minutes. Finally, the data were processed by t-test to obtain the level of creative thinking of the students in the experimental and control classes before the experiment. The specific results are shown in Table 3: N denotes the number of students in the class. X indicates the average test score. S denotes the standard deviation, which is the difference between each student’s score and the mean score. t denotes the observed value and represents the magnitude of the score fluctuation. P indicates whether there was a significant difference between the two groups.
Comparison of innovative thinking and practical ability
| X | S | T | P | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Curiosity | Laboratory class | 30.6 | 29.15 | T=1.3156 | P>0.05 |
| Cross-reference class | 29.3 | 47.36 | |||
| Imagination | Laboratory class | 22.8 | 13.78 | T=1.2125 | P>0.05 |
| Cross-reference class | 23.7 | 13.82 | |||
| Challenge | Laboratory class | 25.24 | 18.25 | t=2.2849 | P<0.05 |
| Cross-reference class | 26.38 | 16.64 | |||
| Positivity | Laboratory class | 23.18 | 16.53 | t=1.3018 | P>0.05 |
| Cross-reference class | 23.31 | 23.39 |
The difference value of challenging between the students of the experimental class and the control class amounted to 1.14, which indicates that there is a difference between the two classes in terms of challenging. And there is no significant difference between the two classes in terms of curiosity, imagination and motivation (P>0.05). At the same time, there is no significant difference between the two classes of students in terms of creative thinking, the ability is relatively average, which is basically consistent with the results of the theoretical analysis of the current teaching status of the thesis.
At the end of the experiment, the creative thinking of the students in the experimental class and the control class was evaluated using the Creative Thinking Measurement Scale, and the results are shown in Table 4:
The comparison of the creative thinking and ability of the experiment
| X | S | T | P | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Curiosity | Laboratory class | 32.2 | 16.92 | t=5.3759 | P<0.05 |
| Cross-reference class | 30.4 | 28.56 | |||
| Imagination | Laboratory class | 32.8 | 16.38 | t=5.3759 | P<0.05 |
| Cross-reference class | 28.2 | 23.18 | |||
| Challenge | Laboratory class | 31.47 | 19.64 | t=5.3759 | P<0.05 |
| Cross-reference class | 28.26 | 17.56 | |||
| Positivity | Laboratory class | 27.78 | 21.03 | t=5.3759 | P<0.05 |
| Cross-reference class | 24.19 | 25.79 |
After the experiment there has been a significant difference between the creative thinking and ability of the two classes, P<0.05. It shows that the creative thinking of the class that has experienced experimental teaching, i.e. the experimental class, is significantly better than that of the control class, and in the case of adopting the same teachers and teaching materials, the control class is only adopting the general teaching, so it can be shown that the strategy of cultivating creative thinking set up in this paper has a stronger effect on the cultivation of students’ creative thinking.
Two classes of students from a university in J city were selected, and the experimental class used informationized entrepreneurship education and the control class used traditional teaching. The cognitive development level is more consistent. In order to ensure the recovery rate of the questionnaire, the questionnaire was distributed by the teacher for on-the-spot distribution and recovery, and 90 questionnaires were distributed to each of the classes where the practice was carried out, a total of 180 questionnaires were distributed and 180 valid questionnaires were recovered. The recovered data was organized and analyzed. The teaching experiment started from the beginning of September 2022 until the end of January 2023, which was the official end of a semester of teaching practice. The teaching experiment process was divided into 12 topics and one section of final assessment, which was conducted for 18 weeks. In this section, the main inquiry is whether information technology can have an impact on students’ creative practice ability, so the teaching effect is mainly to analyze the change of students’ creative practice ability, which mainly includes the analysis of students’ creative works, the analysis of Williams’ Measurement Scale of Creative Tendency, and the analysis of teacher-student interviews.
At the end of each theme task, students will upload their completed theme works to the teacher, and the teacher will score the students based on their completion of the work. Although 12 themes were conducted in this experiment, not every theme involves the production of works, of which Theme 4, Theme 7, Theme 9, and Theme 10 are not involved in the production of works, so the nine innovative works collected were analyzed. The final situation of the completeness of the innovative works in the two classes is shown in Figure 4. From an overall point of view, the completion rate of the theme works of the students in both the experimental class and the control class shows an upward trend, and in the production of theme 5 works, the completion rate of the works of the students in the experimental class has exceeded about 80%, which can show that most of the students in the experimental class have been able to master the basic knowledge and operation of Scraino software and can complete the innovative works based on Scraino software. In addition, from the perspective of time, in the early stage of the experiment, the completion rate of the works of the control class and the experimental class is almost equal, while in the middle and late stage of the experiment, the completion rate of the works of the experimental class is always ahead of that of the control class, which indicates that compared with the traditional teaching, the informatization entrepreneurship education is more capable of stimulating the interest of the students, stimulating the students’ autonomy of learning, and keeping their enthusiasm for learning to complete the production of the innovative works.
The experiment class and the cross section work completion rate
In order to ensure the rationality of the experimental effect, this teaching experiment distributed the Williams Creative Tendency Measurement Scale to the control and experimental classes at the beginning of September 2022 to carry out a pre-test of the students’ initial creative and practical abilities for the teaching experiment. Before the distribution of the scale to give college students sufficient psychological construction, explain the specific rules of answering the questions, and indicate to the students that the distributed scale is in an anonymous form, factual, and answered according to the true thoughts of their hearts. The results obtained are shown in Figure 5:
Test group after the experimental class and the comparison class
After the teaching experiment, the overall scores of the classes in which the experiment was conducted have increased, and the average value of the post-test experimental class scores is 95.93, while the average value of the control class scores is 86.78, and the average value of the scores of the experimental class that adopts informationalized entrepreneurship teaching in terms of the innovation and practical ability is higher than that of the control class that adopts traditional teaching, and the average scores of the innovation and practical ability of the control and experimental classes have appeared to have a certain gap.
The pre-test and post-test of the experimental class are shown in Figure 6, and after the teaching experiment, the results of data analysis can be seen that P=0.002<0.05, which can indicate that there is a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of students’ innovative practical ability in the experimental class. Therefore, it can be seen that entrepreneurship education based on information technology can effectively improve students’ innovative practice ability, and can have a positive impact on students’ innovative practice ability.
The sample statistics of the test group were tested
This paper analyzes in-depth research on the reasonable application of information technology means in the process of entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities, and puts forward the strategy of cultivating students’ innovative thinking and practical ability. Comparative experiments are conducted between the experimental and control groups to study the effects and impact of its generation. The following conclusions can be drawn:
There are significant differences between the experimental class and the control class in terms of challenge, curiosity, imagination and motivation, and the innovative thinking is significantly better than that of the control class, so the strategy of constructing the classroom and extracurricular information environment in this paper has a strong effect on the cultivation of students’ innovative thinking. Before and after the experiment of informatization entrepreneurship education, there is a significant difference in the performance of students’ innovative practical ability in the experimental class. Therefore, it can effectively improve students’ innovative practical ability.
In conclusion, entrepreneurship education using technology can promote the development of students’ innovative thinking and practical abilities.