Assessment of the Implementation of Entrepreneurship Courses in Agricultural Education Programme in Colleges of Education in North-Central, Nigeria

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to assess the implementation of Entrepreneurship Courses in Agricultural Education programme in Colleges of Education in North-Central, Nigeria. The study has three objectives, three research questions and a null hypothesis. The study adopted descriptive survey research design. The population of this study was 1164. The sample size for the study was 303 comprising 84 lecturers, 45 technologists and 174 NCE 3 students. Simple random sampling was used to select one college of education from each state in the zone. A check-list of agro-businesses and a structured questionnaire titled “Agricultural Education Entrepreneurship Courses Implementation questionnaire (AEECIQ)” was designed and used for data collection. The instruments were validated by five Lecturers and trial tested on 30 respondents and reliability coefficient of .998 was obtained using Cronbach’s Alpha method. The data collected was analyzed using frequency count, percentage, mean and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) for the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that; most of the agro-businesses were not available on the school farm, there was low extent of development of agro-businesses in the sampled schools and a low level of agro-business skills was possessed by agricultural education students in Colleges of Education in North-Central, Nigeria. It was therefore recommended amongst others that standard school farms with various agro-businesses should be built by stakeholders as Entrepreneurship Development Centre for practical teaching and learning of entrepreneurship courses.