Performance Appraisal of Practical Education in Agriculture–Forestry Management Programs: A Framework for Talent Development and Rural Revitalization
Main article
Abstract
Practical education has become a strategic pillar of higher-education reform in agriculture–forestry management programmes, but its performance is poorly captured by examination-style metrics alone. This article develops a multi-dimensional performance appraisal framework that integrates curriculum design, teaching process quality, instructor competence, and practice-base environment, and applies it to three Vietnamese second-tier agricultural and forestry universities. Drawing on questionnaire data from 310 final-year undergraduates and 47 faculty members, the analysis combines the analytic hierarchy process with a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation procedure to derive both global indicator weights and composite performance scores. The findings show that instructor pedagogy, time design, and theory-to-practice integration carry the largest marginal effect on overall programme performance, while practice-base environment, although weighted lower, is the dimension most strongly associated with student-reported rural-service readiness. Subgroup analysis indicates that programmes embedded in extension and field-station networks outperform classroom-centred programmes by a statistically meaningful margin on practical-skill and innovation indicators, even when baseline cohort characteristics are comparable. Sensitivity analysis confirms that the proposed appraisal score is robust to ten-per-cent weight perturbations, with rank-order preservation across the three sample institutions. The article concludes that practical-education appraisal should be designed as a continuous, stakeholder-informed governance instrument rather than an annual audit, and proposes a set of optimization pathways linking appraisal results to curriculum revision, instructor development, partnership cultivation with rural cooperatives, and alignment with national rural revitalization objectives.
