An Evaluation of the Maritime Silk Road Culture Curriculum's Impact on Student Awareness and Career Readiness

Abstract

The 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road is a core national opening-up strategy of China, and Quanzhou, as a world heritage site of ancient maritime trade, has unique cultural resources for vocational education. This study evaluates the impact of the Maritime Silk Road Culture curriculum on students’ ideological awareness and career readiness. Adopting a one-group pretest-posttest quasiexperimental design, the study recruited 42 senior students from a vocational university in Quanzhou as participants, and collected data via the Ideological and Political Awareness Questionnaire, Industry Skills Test, and Workplace Readiness Questionnaire over an 8-week curriculum intervention. Results show that after the intervention, students achieved extremely significant improvements in ideological and political awareness, industry knowledge mastery, and overall workplace readiness (all P < 0.001, with large effect sizes). No gender difference was found in educational outcomes, while students with cross-border internship experience showed greater growth in professional skills. Based on the findings, optimization strategies are proposed for curriculum reconstruction and teaching improvement, providing empirical reference for coastal vocational colleges to integrate cultural education with ideological and vocational education.