Students’ Interests in Agriculture: The Impact of School Farms Regarding Fifth and Sixth Graders

Abstract

The present way of intensive agricultural production is closely connected to central issues of sustainable development such as the loss of biodiversity and climate change. The corresponding importance of agriculture stands in contrast to the fact that large parts of society and in particular young members are vastly decoupled from agriculture due to altered living conditions and the structural change in agriculture. Targeted educational programs try to revive the interest of young people in agriculture in order to dispel this discrepancy. In this context, farm education plays a central role as an experience-based and hands-on out-of-school-learning opportunity. The present study analyzes students’ interests in agricultural content areas and their influencing factors. Therefore, a suitable test instrument had to be developed first. Moreover, the potential of a five-day school farm stay with agricultural work experience and a consecutive learning unit in school were investigated with regard to the development of students’ agricultural interests. To do so, a quantitative survey was conducted including four measurement points. Sources of situational interest were determined at both interventions and the interrelationship between situational interest and individual interest in agriculture was considered. The first two studies reveal the development and validation of a test instrument that was composed as a factorial design with four components of individual interest and five agricultural content areas. Besides, the second study proves the importance of prior knowledge, nature experiences, disgust sensitivity, and gender as predictors of interest in agriculture and its content areas. School farm stays of five days duration with hands-on work experiences in various agricultural content areas increased students’ interests in some content areas; this holds in particular for boys, as study 3 demonstrates. In the fourth empirical contribution a model of agricultural interest development with two consecutive extracurricular and curricular treatments was derived from different branches of prior interest research. The results reveal that a consecutive learning unit in school subsequent to the farm stay could maintain the increased levels of interest, which, decreased in the medium term five weeks later, however. Concerning situational interest in working on the school farm, especially the subjective experience of one’s own competence, but also perceived autonomy and social relatedness were of importance. Situational interest in the learning unit in school was better facilitated by a combination of instructional catch and hold elements in comparison to other variants of the same learning unit that contained either catch or hold elements only. In the course of interest development throughout the four measurements, reciprocal influences of situational and individual interest became apparent. Overall, the thesis argues for repeated educational interventions in agricultural contexts in order to strengthen related individual interests in the long run.