ABSTRACT
It is widely agreed that education systems in Africa are short of life skills that link well with rural communities yet arguments for vocationalizing curricula are mixed. In Uganda, where 80% of the population lives in rural areas, agriculture is being taught as a fully fledged subject in primary schools since 2001. This was in attempt to address the issue of growing school dropout rates from the Universal Primary Education introduced by government in 1997. However, the efficacy of the instructional methods used was questionable. The quality of school gardens was particularly singled out as being very critical for the successful inculcation of farming skills and lasting positive attitudes. This study, conducted among eight schools drawn from Kumi and Tororo districts of Eastern Uganda, sought to assess the effectiveness of Supervised Agricultural Experience Projects (SAEPs) in promoting learning transfer in primary school agriculture (PSA), and the use of pupils in conveying information to parents. It had four specific objectives, namely to determine: (a) how the curriculum is implemented at school level; (b) effectiveness of SAEPs method in teaching for transfer at primary school level; (c) school and home factors influencing the application and/ or transfer of the knowledge and skills acquired by pupils; and (d) pupils’ ability to serve as sources of information to their parents. A quasi-experimental research design was used to compare the performance of pupils with school-based gardens and pupils with home-based gardens for four school terms over the period June 2006 to July 2007. Altogether 589 subjects (pupils, parents, teachers, advisory committee members) participated in the study. The performance of school and home-based gardening groups was compared using t-tests. Significant differences (P0.05) were established for parents’ attitudes and pupils’ self-efficacy but results were not significant (P0.05) for knowledge of vegetable production among the two gardening groups. In addition an analysis of the curriculum revealed that despite the new agriculture curriculum, the gains in time allocated to the subject on time-tables, and supply of textbooks; the subject was still poorly taught resulting in limited skills accruing to pupils. Teachers had inadequate specialized training in agriculture (used only eight out of 22 teaching methods and had difficulty teaching 60% of content); school gardening faced shortages of inputs due to lack of a funding mechanism for the practical aspects of the subject; while agriculture has little weighting in the Science paper during primary leaving examinations. However, 65% of stakeholders showed willingness to support school gardening. It was established that SAEPs promoted learning-by-doing, not withstanding the limited skills among teachers, supervision and resource requirements. School related factors affecting SAEPs included: administrative conflicts, poor time-tabling and destruction of school gardening crops by stray livestock. Household factors included: unsupportive parental attitudes and time constraints for both pupils and parents. Seventy-two (72%) percent of the pupils reported sharing school gardening information with their parents but their effectiveness was limited by the socio-cultural environment in form of timidity, difficulty in articulating concepts introduced to them in English, and tendency of parents to discount information given by children. It is recommended that the PSA curriculum be reviewed to include use of SAEPs; school gardens should be funded from school facilities grants rather than from capitation funds for instructional materials; and pupils be used as sources of farming information to parents through specially designed outreach programs.
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