Abstract:
The findings of this study give a clear view of the importance of learning activities and experiential learning to college of agriculture capstone courses. Each component serves as an integral part of the entire process. The North American Association of Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture (NACTA) has published several articles detailing the importance of capstone courses within the discipline. Capstone courses are prevalent among all disciplines in colleges and universities across the nation. They provide an opportunity to incorporate previously learned, often disjointed, information into an interconnected contextual frame of reference from which to transition into a career or further study.
Certain key elements hold true for all experientially based capstone courses. They are that capstone courses must contain the components indicated in the Model for the Integration of Experiential Learning into Capstone Courses (MIELCC) and the five R's of receive, relate, reflect, refine, and reconstruct be utilized to continually process and evaluate the learning which takes place. It is often these steps (the five R's) which are omitted from the learning process. Care must be exercised and precautions taken to ensure that capstone courses are truly the summative educational experience for our students.
Keywords:
capstone courses, practitioners, experiential learning
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