Attitude Formulation Of Ethnic Minority Students Toward The Food And Agricultural Sciences

Abstract

Most solutions that have been implemented to eliminate the persistent under-representation of ethnic minority students in colleges of agricultural sciences have produced limited success. Many of these solutions ignore theories which suggest that education and substantive experiences must precede positive attitudes and resultant behaviors toward the food and agricultural sciences (FAS). Also, during high school, many minorities do not enroll in upper level science courses that FAS majors require. Given these scenarios, this research investigated the influence of an FAS pre-college workshop on the attitudes of participants. Forty-four academically talented high school minority students were selected for the one-week workshop taught by college faculty and 28 students participated Objective #1 focused on the stability of the 28 participants' FAS attitudes. When the workshop began, the participants agreed that they (1) knew little about food and agricultural science careers and (2) associated the FAS with farms. However, they left the workshop with more positive attitudes that were maintained a year later. Objective #2 compared the attitudes of the 28 workshop participants and 16 comparable students who did not participate in the workshop. On six of 10 indicators, the participants had significantly more positive attitudes than nonparticipants.Recommendations for future pre-college programming are offered based on the findings.