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Journal of Research in Technical Careers

Keywords

agricultural education, agricultural mechanics, courses

Disciplines

Curriculum and Instruction | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Higher Education | Higher Education and Teaching | Vocational Education

Abstract

Preparing pre-service students to teach agricultural mechanics is a difficult task due to the career pathway including a great variety of topics (Byrd et al., 2015). This study examined the trend in requirements in 1862 land-grant universities for number of courses, course credit hours, and course topics related to agricultural mechanics, as well as the total credit hours needed for degree completion in agricultural education, teacher education. Overall, the universities examined had lessened the total course credit hours related to agricultural mechanics courses from 8.33 to 11.83 credit hour requirements in 1980, to a range of 6.67 to 8.33 credit hours in 2021. As such, the total credit hours required for teacher education degree completion in agricultural education had decreased from an average of 128.4 total credit hours to 125.0 credit hours over the same time period. Course topics found to be the most common from 1980 to 2021 were Intro to Ag Mechanics, Welding, and Construction/Structures. It is recommended that qualitative interviews be conducted with cognizant university faculty to ascertain the importance of the various course topics and analyze how topics were identified as priorities in their respective programs, including whether the views of industry stakeholders were considered and addressed.

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