Author : Directo, Alejandro V.

Summary : The study sought to identify the cognitive and psychomotor competency levels of the graduating BS in Agriculture (BSA) students and to compare these two learning domains in three school categories, namely: state colleges and universities (SCUs); Department of Education, Culture, and Sports (DECS) and private colleges and universities (PCUs) in relation to their level of compliance to the Technical Panel for Agricultural Education (TPAE) minimum standards. It also sought to determine the extent of contribution of such factors as personal, institutional, socio-economic, and teacher-related to the cognitive and psychomotor skill performances of the students. Respondents were graduating BSA students and vocational-technical instructors from six agricultural schools in the Regions I, II, III, and IV of the Philippines. Student respondents were selected by using the proportional allocation technique and simple random sampling, while the complete enumeration procedure was adopted for the instructors. Data were gathered by administering a 75-item cognitive test and evaluating the actual operation of agricultural skills. Other information were gathered by means of a questionnaire, personal interview, and plain assessment of student academic records. Percentages, means, frequency counts, standard deviation, T-test, F-test, Chi-square test, analysis of variance, and Kendall's coefficient, regression and correlation were used in data analyses. Overall, the performance of the BSA graduating students was generally low both in terms of cognitive ability and psychomotor skill competancy. The cognitive and psychomotor learning performances of SCU students were higher than of DECS students. DECS students, in turn, performed better than PCU students. Results also revealed "high compliance" to the TPAE standards enhanced the cognitive knowledge performances of students to a considerable degree (Coefficient E = 0.683**).