ABSTRACT

 The problem that led to the study was the fact that graduates of Colleges of Education in the study area were exposed to the apiculture curriculum but could not possess the minimum competency for entry into entrepreneurship in apiculture due to the inability of the lecturers to demonstrate the skills needed to impart needed knowledge to the students. It therefore requires that a research be conducted to identity the areas where the lecturers need competency improvement in apiculture establishment. The study therefore determined the entrepreneurial competency improvement needs of agricultural education lecturers for effective teaching of apiculture in Colleges of Educations in South-South, Nigeria. The study was guided by eight research questions and eight null hypotheses which were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study was 181 comprising of 96 agricultural education lecturers in Colleges of Education and 85 wildlife management lecturers in Universities in the study area. The entire population were used for the study because it is manageable. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire which was divided into two categories namely: “competency need of lecturers in apiculture questionnaire (CNLAQ)” and “Lecturers Performance in Apiculture Questionnaire (LPAQ)”. The two categories were divided into parts A and B. Part A dealt with information on the relevant personal or socio-economic characteristics of the respondents while part B dealt with actual contents of apiculture in the questionnaire. The questionnaire was validated by five experts, three in Agricultural Education, one in Measurement and Evaluation and one in Wildlife Resources Management all in Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. The reliability of the instrument was established using Cronbach alpha coefficient on a pilot study of 50 similar respondents in South East and an internal consistency of 0.85 and 0.82 were obtained for CNLAQ and LPAQ respectively, showing that the instrument is reliable for the study. Data were collected by the researcher with the help of 6 research assistants. A total of 178 of the 181 copies of the properly filled questionnaire were retrieved and analyzed using mean and improvement need index (INI) for research questions; and z-test for testing the null hypotheses. It was found from the study that lecturers need entrepreneurial competency improvements in all the 8 clusters in apiculture for effective teaching in Colleges of Education. However, the study showed that lecturers need less improvement in marketing compared to other clusters. It was also found that there was no significant difference between the mean responses of Agricultural Education lecturers and the Wild life management lecturers in all the 8 hypotheses tested for the study. The study concluded that Agricultural Education lecturers need entrepreneurial competency improvement in; Planning-(8 items), beehive construction-(17 items), stocking of beehive- (36 items), feeding of breeding species-(18 items), diseases and pest control-(23 items), harvesting-(15 items), processing-(30 items) and marketing-(1 item). Among the recommendations made were that lecturers should individually seek improvement in the identified competency areas of apiculture through workshops, capacity building programmes and conferences so that they can effectively teach the students apiculture establishment. Also, the school management should organize in-school retraining for agricultural education lecturers using specialized resource persons in apiculture to impart skills in the identified areas of need to them. Furthermore, the identified entrepreneurial competency needs should be enshrined in the curriculum when reviewed for use in universities where upcoming lecturers in Colleges of Education are trained.