An assessment of Iowa agriculture instructors\u27 needs for technical inservice education and curriculum materials

The purpose of this study was to assess the inservice educational needs of Iowa agricultural education instructors. The study was designed to assess possible delivery methods, location, content, and format of future programs as well as needs for curricular materials;For this study, the sample consisted of two hundred and six instructors drawn from a population of three hundred and twenty-six secondary and post-secondary agriculture instructors. The questionnaire was developed and reviewed within the Department of Agricultural Education, reliability testing of the questionnaire yielded a Cronbach alpha score of.92 before it was sent. The questionnaire was then mailed to the sample, with a follow-up mailing three weeks later. The return rate of one hundred and nineteen (119) questionnaires was fifty-eight percent (58%). A shortened one page questionnaire, with randomly selected questions, was mailed to 50% of the nonresponders;Data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The statistical procedures used to analyze the data included; frequency counts, percentages, means, standard deviation, oneway anova, and t-tests. A 95% confidence level (alpha =.05) was set a priori;Results of this study determined that secondary instructors requested the same top five topics for both inservice training and needs for new teaching materials. This was repeated by post-secondary instructors with the selection of four of the same five topics. Instructors reported not attending inservice meetings because of inconvenient times; they couldn\u27t take time from other duties; it was too far to travel; and inservice topics were not relevant. Instructors preferred summer inservice delivery times, weekday workshops of one or more days during summer and the summer conference for inservice programs. Two to three hour night meetings during the school year were also considered to be acceptable. Saturday meetings during the school year or in summer were not popular. Credit workshops, videotapes and community college offerings were ranked as the most popular delivery method. Fiber optic network, satellite TV, and computer network programs were rated low by secondary instructors but preferred by the post-secondary instructor