Development of a test for measuring the knowledge level of farmers in maize cultivation

Abstract

It has become imperative to develop an effective and holistic system of high production and tackling pests to make it more environmental friendly, economically viable and socially acceptable to farmers which can be achieved through adoption of technologies, so it is very important to assess the knowledge level of farmers in maize farming in order to identify gap in adoption. Hence, a study was designed to develop a standardized test using test construction methodology adopting item analysis procedure, pilot tested with 30 farmer members from non-sample area. The final test consisted of 7 questions having difficulty index value in the range of 30 to 80 and discrimination index value above 0.3 and above was retained and used to measure the knowledge of maize growing farmers. The reliability of the knowledge test was measured with the help of split-half method and the reliability co-efficient was found to be 0.8, which indicates that the knowledge test is reliable. Also, criterion validity was measured after establishing theoretical relationship between knowledge and adoption of recommended package of practice. Adoption levels of recommended package of practices for maize were calculated for 30 farmers. These scores were correlated with the knowledge scores. The ‘r’ value was found to be 0.85. Since the ‘r’ values were significant at 0.01 level of probability, the scale developed was considered as valid. The test was further administered to 150 respondents and it was found that majority of the respondents (44%) had medium level of knowledge about recommended package of practices for paddy cultivation.