Abstract:

The National Collegiate Landscape Competition (NCLC) is an annual competition where landscape, horticulture, and allied majors compete in 30-plus events at a host school in North America. Student participants come from four-year universities, community colleges, and trade schools. The events range from equipment trials, business management, plant identification, and design events. Educators, students, and the landscape industry recognize this event as a valuable learning opportunity that affords students a hands-on, experiential learning opportunity. This study focuses on the competitions five design-oriented events (irrigation design, interior landscape design, exterior landscape design, 3D exterior landscape design, and computer aided landscape design). Researchers looked to determine whether the curricula and accreditation status of the participating schools affected results. The study collected five years of competitive result data from the design events. Detrended Correspondence Analysis in Canoco 4.5 (Ter Braak and Smilauer 2002) was performed to ordinate the schools and their scores in the five events evaluated. Data used in the analysis was only from schools that competed in all five design events (n=27). Investigators categorized the schools by program type, four-year curriculum (n=16), two-year curriculum (n=11), and accreditation status (n=13, 4-year n=5, 2-year n=8). Accredited degree programs receive accreditation status from the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP). Overall, the data shows that students who took part in design events from four-year programs scored higher than students from other institutions with only one two-year program ranking in the top 10 and five in top 20. Accreditation status of four-year schools was not strongly correlated with student outcomes in the design events with only three 4-year schools in the top 10 being accredited, and five not accredited. By comparison, three of the eight accredited two-year programs finished in the top 15. This research showed that few significant differences existed between accredited versus non-accredited programs in the competition’s design events. However, the data indicated a negative correlation between 4-year programs’ performance compared to 2-year programs’ performance in the five design events. Assessing the performance of programs in the competitions design events provides insight that can be used to identify opportunities for improved student learning in preparation for the competition. The overarching educational value of the National Collegiate Landscape Competition is greater than the sum of individual events.

Keywords:

Experiential learning, hands-on learning, design pedagogy, competition, problem based learning.