Students’ Awareness, Capability and Perspective: Baseline for a Collaborative Community Extension Engagement

Collaboration is a vital factor to a successful community extension undertaking. As SUCs are mandated to perform community extension works, forming a functional collaboration with prospective partners could bring substantial gain to the institution. One of the possible schemes that the university or college can build is a partnership with the students. This study looked into the awareness, capability and perspective of the students of the College of Arts and Sciences of Eastern Visayas State University Main Campus relative to community extension. These variables were considered as constructive references in formulating mechanisms and strategies for a collaborative implementation of the extension agenda of the college. This study used a quantitative method using a survey design. Participants of the study were grouped according to year level and were identified through stratified random sampling. A researchermade survey questionnaire was administered to the participants through google form. Obtained data were analyzed and interpreted using Descriptive Statistics, Analysis of Variance and Tukey's HSD as analysis tools. The results of the survey showed that students have limited knowledge of the college extension undertakings. However, the students showed high capability in some areas of engagement such as promoting good governance, promoting gender and development, and enhancing literacy/numeracy skills. The study also disclosed that the students have a favorable perspective toward community extension. It further showed that there was no significant difference in the awareness and overall capability among the different year levels of the students. However, the results revealed a significant difference in the capability between certain groups of students, specifically in developing livelihood skills and income-generating activities. In addition, significant differences in perception were also found between groups of students. The study concluded that the students have the skills, potentials and a favorable outlook that can complement the delivery of the college extension services. Thus, implementation of extension agenda of the college may be enhanced through a facultystudent collaboration. This may be done by encouraging students' involvement, instituting incentive and reward mechanisms and providing them equal and inclusive opportunities to further elevate their awareness and capability while reducing if not eliminating differences in their perspective toward community extension.