A Century of Agronomic Education

Abstract

Journals published by the American Society of Agronomy (ASA) richly chronicle the growth and success of agronomic education. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Agronomy Journal, we compiled this historical recognition of the aggregate effort of our predecessors and colleagues. Their talented and dedicated legacy has played a significant role in feeding the world while protecting soil and water resources. By consulting our past we seek wisdom for the future, knowing that educational challenges of equal significance wait. The first volume (1909) included an article on instruction in soil physics and approximately 650 more education articles have since appeared. Most early articles focused on soils and crops course descriptions and their need for standardization. Then emphasis switched to teaching methods, aids, philosophies, student characteristics, evaluation, and curricula. Contributions from land‐grant institutions have been most numerous, but other sources are becoming more common. The number of articles has steadily increased, as has author collaboration on articles, growing from only about 10% in early years to about 70% in recent editions. We hope our abbreviated summary of the past stimulates you into consulting the writings of your esteemed predecessors and that you find validation of your efforts toward making a difference in some future agronomic record. As global pressures increase the demands on agronomic education, history may provide a pattern for success. Past achievements suggest that agronomic education is well‐founded and can be expected to impact the next century of learning as capably as it did its first century.

Teaching Sustainable Soil Management: A Framework for Using Problem-Based Learning

“…This was very encouraging since student confidence in the presentation of concepts is crucial for their learning (Thien et al, 2008). This response also gave us confidence that the case was appropriately designed, since one of the main challenges within PBL is achieving a well-designed problem scenario.…”

“…One of the approaches to enhance postsecondary soil science curricula is through adoption of the problem-based learning (PBL) instructional method; PBL originated from the medical school program at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, in the 1960s (Barrows and Tamblyn, 1980;Barrows and Kelson, 1995) and it has spread to other areas of professional education (Duch et al, 2001;Thien et al, 2008). In PBL, student learning centers on complex, open-ended problem scenarios to encourage communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and self-directed learning skills (Barrows and Tamblyn, 1980).…”

Integration of Problem‐Based Learning and Web‐Based Multimedia to Enhance a Soil Management Course

“…The constructivist learning environment nurtures student problem‐solving and the building of conceptual models (Jonassen, 1999). Since the early 1990s, case‐based collaborative learning (the educational approach under which PBL is categorized) has been widely adopted by agricultural and natural resource educators because it allows students to build the skills of communication and group work, while reinforcing relevant content knowledge (Thien et al, 2008). In web‐based learning, there has been an emphasis on constructivist approaches (Bates, 2008), as students create their own knowledge by seeking out information and building their own informational frameworks (Chumley‐Jones et al, 2002).…”