The purpose of this descriptive correlational study was to describe the home economics student teaching program at the University of Swaziland as perceived by the home economics teachers and teacher educators (home economics educators). A mail questionnaire developed as a result of a review of literature was used to determine the home economics educators' perceptions regarding the importance and achievement of (1) the objectives of student teaching, (2) student teaching experiences/activities, (3) professional education courses taken prior to student teaching, and (4) the procedures for selecting cooperating teachers, and the importance and adequacy of role or skill performance in (1) the roles and responsibilities of cooperating teachers and university supervisors, and (2) the procedures for supervising and evaluating student teachers. Additionally, the Borich Needs Assessment Model was used to determine the student teaching program improvement needs and inservice training needs of the home economics educators.
The target population in this study included all the secondary and high school home economics teachers (137) and seven teacher educators. However, usable data was received from 91 (66.4 percent) home economics teachers and 100 percent from teacher educators, a return rate of 69 percent (98 of 142).
An analysis of the results revealed that the identified objectives, student teaching experiences, professional education courses, and procedures for selecting cooperating teachers were generally perceived as important but were not achieved. The results also revealed that the roles and responsibilities of cooperating teachers and university supervisors, and procedures for supervising and evaluating student teachers were perceived as important. However, performances of these roles and/or skills were perceived to be inadequate.
The mean discrepancy scores indicated that the high priority areas for improvement (by rank) are: procedures for selecting cooperating teachers, the student teaching experiences, objectives of student teaching, and professional education courses. High priority areas for training needs were indicated for: evaluation procedures, university supervisor's role, cooperating teacher's role, and supervision procedures.
The ANOVA revealed no significant differences between the groups at the 0.05 level. Spearman rank correlations revealed the relationships between the perceptions of the home economics educators and their levels of education, years of service, and place of training were moderate to low.
