Measurement of the effectiveness of an educational program inspired by indigenous knowledge for forest management, applied to Forest Engineering students at the National University of Central Peru, using the neutrosophic 2-tuple linguistic method

Abstract

The “guide to Asháninka knowledge for forest management” is a document prepared by academics and scientists from the National University of Central Peru (NUCP) in the Faculty of Forestry Engineering, which includes the knowledge of this indigenous people about forest nature. Despite being ancestral knowledge, we believe that it can serve as a complement to the scientific study of the subject since it is based on knowledge accumulated over centuries of experience. The main purpose of this article is to determine the influence of the “Ashaninka knowledge guide for forest management” on the learning level of NUCP Forest Engineering students. To accomplish these objectives, Asháninka knowledge was compiled, and the learning guide was designed and applied to the students. 36 students from the faculty were taken as part of the study, to whom two tests were administered, one before studying the guide and another after. The tests consisted of questionnaires on knowledge about the guide and the forests. A neutrosophic linguistic scale was used for respondents to answer both tests. The advantage of this methodology is that experts could evaluate more easily with the help of natural language, in addition to the fact that the incorporation of neutrosophy helps to take into account indeterminacy and therefore there is more accuracy. Specifically, the Neutrosophic 2-tuple linguistic method was used. The results were converted to crisp numbers and the evaluations of the two tests were compared with the help of the Wilcoxon test.

Keywords

• knowledge of indigenous peoples
• asháninka people
• forest engineering
• neutrosophic 2-tuples linguistic method
• wilcoxon range test