Resetting the Evaluation Indicators for School Garden Education Service

Abstract

Background and objective The vitalization of urban agriculture has increased various forms of experience-based education using school gardens, which raised the importance of school gardens in terms of value as well as the need to develop an implementation system for education-based agricultural experience service using school gardens. Thus, we reset the evaluation indicators from the previous study to establish objective evaluation indicators that enable quantitative comparison of school garden education services. Methods Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and direct question (DQ) surveys were conducted on 20 experts from October 12 to 19, 2020 after establishing the purpose and subjects of evaluation, and then the weights were calculated using the Expert Choice 2010 program. Results First, we analyzed the problems of the previous indicators by categorizing the performance indicators and comparing and verifying them with six requirements of valuation. Then, we added ‘welfare values’ and established sub-indicators accordingly. The importance of value indicator in AHP was in the order of education values (0.544), health values (0.182), welfare values (0.164), environmental values (0.062), and economic values (0.049). The importance of environmental and economic values was relatively low, less than 0.1. The importance of sub-indicators was highest in cultivating character (0.144), followed by enhancing ecological sensitivity (0.141) > promoting mental health (0.134) > cultivating agricultural literacy (0.120) > improving social skills (0.104). And mitigating climate change in environmental values was lowest (0.009). Increase in income was the lowest (0.036). This can be regarded as the expression of change to increase the educational effect based on collective life and the connotative meaning of ‘school’. In the case of DQ, the AHP weight and order were the same, but the environmental and economic values were relatively low, and the result was different from AHP weight. For sub-indicators, the importance in DQ was highest in promoting mental health (0.136), followed by promoting physical health (0.085), ]cultivating character (0.082), social integration (0.072), and enhancing ecological sensitivity (0.071). After reviewing related experts, we came up with 5 evaluation indicators and 16 sub-indicators for school garden education service, which are objective evaluation indicators that enable quantitative comparison. Conclusion In the future, we will validate the socioeconomic values of school garden education services and contribute to revitalizing school gardens by establishing policy alternatives for effective operation and management of school gardens.