15 pages, Increasing popularity of economic experiments for policy impact analysis has led to an on-going debate about the suitability of students to substitute professionals as experimental subjects. To date, subject pool effects in agricultural and resource economics experiments have not been sufficiently studied. In order to identify differences and similarities between students and non-students, we carry out an experiment in the form of a multi-period business management game that is adapted to an agri-environmental context. We compare the compliance behaviour of German agricultural students and German farmers with regard to water protection rules and analyse their responses to two different green nudge interventions. The experimental results reveal that the direction of the response to the policy treatments is similar. Even unexpected behaviour could be reproduced by the student sample. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the treatment effects differed between the two samples. This implies that experimenters in the field of agricultural and resource economics could use the subject pool of students to analyse the direction of nudge policies. If predictions should be made about the magnitude effects, we suggest using a professional subject pool.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 18 Document Number: D10474
Notes:
126 pages., ISBN: 9780438013049, Via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses., Genetically modified foods and crops are a topic of heated debate in the United States. As with all issues, messaging has the potential to influence and change an individual’s attitude. Through the lens of social judgment theory, this quasi-experimental study investigated the influence of an evidence-based message on millennial agricultural students’ attitudes towards genetically modified foods and crops, while taking into account participants’ ego-involvements for the issue. Sixty-nine undergraduate students in the College of Agriculture participated in this study – comprised of a pre-test and post-test questionnaire with an evidence-based message intervention between.
The major finding from this study was that for the issue of genetically modified foods, millennial agricultural students’ with high ego-involvement are capable of attitude change and moving their anchor points in the direction of viewing genetically modified foods and crops less favorably than prior to the evidence-based message intervention. This result was unexpected, but important. Another key finding is that the majority of millennial agricultural students reported holding favorable attitudes towards genetically modified foods. In regards to the risks of genetically modified foods, the majority of participants disagreed that there is any risk associated with eating genetically modified foods and were neutral towards any environmental risks of genetically modified crops. This study also investigated the role of ego-involvement and the widths of the latitudes of acceptance, noncommitment, and rejection. While there was a trend for the latitude of acceptance to increase and for the latitude of rejection to decrease for both the high and low ego-involvement groups, these findings were insignificant.
Overall, this study’s findings provides great insight to science communicators who are messaging with the goal of influencing attitude change. Utilizing key elements of science communication including, weight of evidence reporting, weight of experts reporting, reinforcement of self-identity, credibility, valence, and framing theory, it is possible to influence attitude change, at least for millennial agricultural students with high ego-involvement for the issue of genetically modified foods. Future research should expand to include other segments of the population, as well as other science issues.
Ruiz-Carpio, Miguel Rafael (author), Safai, Cyrus (author), Djobo, Arafat (author), Gaichuk, Ivan (author), and Safai, Nick M. (author)
Format:
Paper
Publication Date:
2018
Published:
International
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 93 Document Number: D10863
Notes:
Poster/paper published in proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education annual conference and exposition, Salt Lake City, Utah. 2018, pages 1-15., Motivating, promoting interest in teaching engineering subjects is always a challenge for undergraduate engineering students especially for junior and lower level students. This approach also brought social awareness to members of the group, as well as tolerance and responsibility. It also emphasized to the students a tolerant and an open-minded world, now and forevermore. A group of multinational, multicultural undergraduate students at Salt Lake Community College, majoring in Civil, Mechanical, Electrical and Computer engineering are working on a project involving vertical farming, hydroponic watering, and making the plant growing process smart.
Food and its availability is of major concern in all nations, especially the underdeveloped communities. Students get exposed to different engineering disciplines, and learn how to work in a multicultural team and become socially responsible in an ever increasing connected world. Each student also becomes a teacher to other students at times discussing his specialty and field of engineering.
15 pages., ISSN-1042-0541, Via ERIC., Employers have identified oral and written communications skills to be the most important skills graduates should possess when entering the workforce. In order for faculty to better understand their students' oral and written communications skills, they should understand what apprehension the students have toward oral and written communications. Specifically, no studies have been found that explore communication apprehension (CA) or writing apprehension (WA) in agricultural communications students. The purpose of this study was to qualitatively explore agricultural communications students' perceptions of CA and WA. Participants believe agricultural communications instructors set up an environment that is conducive to changing behavior. However, students realized and identified areas of improvement that could help them lower their CA and WA. Recommendations for practice are provided in order to help alleviate CA and WA in agricultural communications students.
10 pages, United States science scores have remained stable over the past 12 years, and as a result secondary school students have been deemed less proficient than international peers. Additionally, there has been increased pressure for accountability from both teachers and students. This highly competitive performance-based classroom environment has threatened student motivation. Due to this, many have moved away from an emphasis on rote memorization and lessened the threat of performance testing by using inquiry and problem solving strategies as a way to provide more autonomy in the classroom. Agricultural education has joined the movement in providing autonomy in the classroom through inquiry-based teaching methods. This study investigates the perceptions of school-based agriscience students toward agriscience and inquiry-based instruction when taught through inquiry-based instruction. The perceptions of 170 secondary agriscience students who responded to the questionnaire indicated more favorable attitudes toward agriscience. Participants also had positive responses to items regarding agriculture’s importance to society, and influence in their daily lives. It is recommended that inquiry-based instruction be utilized in the agriscience classroom to promote student learning and motivation. Further investigations on the impacts of student motivation in the classroom when inquiry-based instruction is utilized in school-based agriscience education should be investigated.
Posted at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-07-21-students-farmers_x.htm, Describes student-run farms that have cropped up at almost 60 schools in 27 states in the last decade or so, as well as programs under which local farmers provide food to area universities.
