The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent responses affected students of all ages academically, mentally, and emotionally. As leadership educators, we felt compelled to respond by adjusting our programming and pedagogy for a post-pandemic era. This study aimed to explore the experiences of the thirty college of agricultural science students who engaged…

Understanding agricultural students' environmental perception is necessary to design meaningful interventions to enhance their environmental awareness. This study aims to understand and compare undergraduate students' environmental behavior and perceptions in the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at a Southwestern United…

Service learning is a form of experiential learning that helps students be able to both apply concepts and provide a benefit to an organization, individual, or group other than the learner. The lack of efficacy of our students with the complex skills learned in many agriculture courses brings about a sense of fear and trepidation in students that…

University agricultural programs' struggle to attract students is leading to a disparity in the number of available jobs in agriculture and the number of qualified applicants to fill these positions. This study sought to garner a unique students' perspective of ways that universities and specifically agricultural programs can support and encourage…

This mixed methods study aimed to explore the perceptions of employees' belongingness, uniqueness, and inclusivity within the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) system. A survey with quantitative and qualitative questions was used for data collection from February to April 2021. Respondents were UF/IFAS…

This exploratory study sought to determine if the Fast Friend intervention (Aron, Melinat, Aron, Vallone, & Bator, 1997) improve racial cognizance of cross-group dyads. Data were collected from freshmen (n=34) enrolled in a college of agriculture. The treatment and control groups included cross-group, same-sex, dyads composed of African…

Undergraduate research experiences provide engaging learning opportunities but are often not formally assessed for gains in knowledge and skills. This study examined undergraduate research assessment practices and the implementation of a satisfactory/unsatisfactory (S/U) research course in all academic units within a college of agricultural and…

A sense of belongingness in the underrepresented minorities (URM) collegiate experience requires that the student feel the university provides a safe and welcoming environment. The purpose of this study is to explore the sense of belongingness that contributes to URM's perceptions while participating in the summer programs at Kansas State…

This paper establishes a clearer picture of the demographics of a single cohort of undergraduate students that entered North Carolina State University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) in the fall semester of 2013. We compared the demographics of the cohort with the overall population of North Carolina to determine how well the…

Universities have consistently struggled with undergraduate student retention. However, one variable that has been shown to be an important factor related to undergraduate retention and success has been college student sense of belonging. The purpose of this study was to examine freshmen students' perceived sense of belonging to the University of…

Recently, enrollments at numerous American universities have been trending downward. This has led to an increasingly competitive atmosphere for attracting new students, creating the need to better understand why students ultimately attend their chosen institution. Prior research has explored factors that influence students to pursue agricultural…

Teachers of agriculture have used project-based learning as a primary teaching method in agricultural mechanics since the 19th century. These methods teach the information and motivate students to engage the content. Locus of Control (LOC) categorizes the relationship with decision-making and motivation. Internal LOC have a higher level of…