A Study on Enhancing the Vocational Education and Curriculum Standards for Producing High Performance Manpower in Agriculture and Fisheries

Abstract

The purposes of the study on a model development for enhancing the vocational education and curriculum standard for producing high performance manpower in agriculture and fisheries were 1) to study the context of the vocational education in agriculture and fisheries and 2) to develop a model for enhancing the vocational education and curriculum standards. There were two stages for conducting this study. The first stage, literature reviewing and focus group discussion were carried out.The population of this study included 47 agricultural colleges and fisheries colleges. A sample group, 10colleges offering agriculture and fisheries programs, was selected by purposive sampling and 28 stakeholders from each college were recruited. The second stage,  surveying the perspectives of stakeholders on  the model was conducted using a questionnaire. Two colleges offering agriculture and fisheries programs from the Institute of Vocational Education in Agriculture in northern, northeasthern, central and southern regions, were selected by purposive sampling. A sample group of 8 colleges with 224stakeholders was obtained. Content analysis was used to analyzed qualitative research and the arithmetic mean and standard deviation were used to analyzed the quantitative research. The results indicated that the appropriate model development for enhancing the vocational education and curriculum standard for producing high performance manpower in agriculture and fisheries was the model developed from the  framework of the backward Theory of Change (ToC) including impacts, outcomes, outputs, processes and inputs. It was found that the perspectives on the model development and implementation of all sample groups in all categories were at good level.