Individual Instruction in Vocational Agriculture

Abstract

An experiment conducted by the writer during the school year 1927 28 in seven rural schools in Van Buren County and Faulkner County, Arkansas, indicated that pupils in these schools made more satisfactory progress in vocational agriculture through individualized instruction than by means of group or mass instruction.2 These schools were typical rural schools, located in the open country and having approximately the same enrollment. Each school offered first year vocational agriculture to pupils in the ninth and tenth grades. This study was conducted for the purpose of trying out a form of individualized instruction, a method that would permit individual prog ress in accordance with pupil ability. The need for employing such a method of instruction came as a result of experience and was further manifested by statistical data indicating marked variations in ability and irregularity in attendance of pupils in vocational agriculture. During the past school session, pupils were found in the seven schools referred to above with mental ages ranging from eleven to eighteen years, in the same class. The average class attendance for pupils in these schools varied from sixty to seventy-two out of a possible eighty attendance days during one semester. The experiment was conducted over a period of four months and in volved two groups of pupils, comparable, in-so-far as possible, with ref erence to size of classes, type of pupils, training and experience of in structors, and amount of reference and laboratory material available. The pupils in these two groups spent ninety minutes each day in class work in vocational agriculture. Thirty-five pupils enrolled in first year vocational agriculture in four schools comprised the test group. These pupils pursued a plan for in dividualized instruction in vocational agriculture. This plan consisted of an individual study of farm jobs from job sheets prepared to serve as guides to study exercises, practice exercises, and testing exercises. No effort was made to include subject matter in these job sheets other than