AAQEP Accreditation 2022
Standard 4 Aspect F
The program is committed to and invests in strengthening and improving the education profession and the P-20 education system. Each program’s context (or multiple contexts) provides particular opportunities to engage the field’s shared challenges and to foster and support innovation. Engagement with critical issues is essential and must be contextualized. Sharing results of contextualized engagement and innovation supports the field’s collective effort to address education’s most pressing challenges through improvement and innovation.
The Agriculture Specialist Instruction Credential program and its prerequisites include a purposeful, developmentally designed sequence of coursework and field experiences that effectively prepare candidates to serve as agriculture specialists in California schools and lead agriculture education programs. The sequenced design of the program is based on a clearly stated rationale that has a sound theoretical and scholarly foundation anchored in the knowledge base of teacher education. The program’s organizational structure ensures that all of its administrative components are carefully coordinated. By design, the program provides extensive opportunities for candidates to learn and apply the concepts, skills and principles which are aligned with the university and program mission and vision.
Mission:
To prepare individuals for successful careers in agricultural education by providing
them with leadership, communications, managerial, technical, and problem solving skills
for improving the quality of agriculture and life in a diverse society.
Vision:
Professionally and technically competent agriculture teachers in every California
high school agriculture department.
Data sources used to ensure the program aligns with institutional and programmatic missions:
Data Source 1: Employer Survey
Internal program survey: Quantitative data collected using an online survey instrument.
How to use data to ensure alignment with mission:
Approximately every five years the Agriculture Specialist Program administers a survey
to the School Site Administrator of each of our program completers to determine their
perceptions of how well the program prepared their teacher for their duties as an
agriculture teacher. The Agriculture Specialist Employer Survey provides us with administrators’
perceptions of how well the program prepared their ag teacher with content and pedagogy
necessary to carry out their role as agriculture teachers.
Results from the Employer Survey are then analyzed by the Ag. Specialist faculty in an effort to assess how effectively the program prepares high quality, technically, and professionally competent new teachers, as called for in the mission/vision of the Kremen School of Education and our Agricultural Education program.
Data Source 2: Program Completer Follow Up Survey
Internal program survey to program graduates: Quantitative data collected using an online survey instrument.
How to use data to ensure alignment with mission:
As discussed throughout this QAR, approximately every five years the Agriculture Specialist
Program administers a survey to program completers to determine their perceptions
of how well the program prepared them for teaching agriculture, specifically their
technical and professional competencies. and the effectiveness of the agricultural
coursework in preparing them to teach the core areas of agriculture and perform their
professional responsibilities.
Results from the Program Completer Follow Up Survey are analyzed by the Ag. Specialist faculty in an effort to assess how effectively the program prepares high quality, technically and professionally component new teachers as called for in the mission/vision of the Kremen School of Education and our Agricultural Education program.
Data Source 3: Agricultural Education Student Outcomes Assessment Plan (SOAP)
Multiple measures comprise the program’s SOAP assessment plan: Quantitative & Qualitative data sources are utilized.
How to use data to ensure alignment with mission:
Planning at the programmatic level to assess student learning outcomes is reflected
in the program’s SOAP. The SOAP is maintained at the department/program level and
is updated periodically to reflect assessment activities and results and changing
circumstances.
The program uses SOAP assessment results in order to either demonstrate that students are achieving the designated learning outcomes or to make adjustments to the curriculum and program in order to assist students in achieving proficiency in the required learning outcomes. Program level assessment is directly connected to institutional values, mission and outcomes. Here is a link to the Ag. Education program SOAP.