Development and Validation of a Children’s Agricultural Literacy Instrument for Local Food

Abstract

While increasing agricultural literacy (AL) has been the focus of numerous educational programs, few AL scales have been developed specifically for children. AL programming struggles to rigorously evaluate their programs, particularly when little time is available for assessments in informal contexts. The lack of evaluation tools that allow to accurately measure educational impacts compromises progress on AL. In this paper, we present the development and validation of the Agricultural Literacy Instrument for Local Foods (ALI-LF) for children between the ages of 9 and 13. The instrument measures three domains of agricultural literacy (knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors). We pilot tested the instrument with children between 9 and 13 years old at a local arboretum and further validated the instrument at six agritourism farms. To analyze the data, we used principal component factor, Cronbach’s alpha, and descriptive statistics. The results support a comprehensive reliable instrument validated for informal contexts, such as farms offering recreational or educational activities to visitors (i.e., agritourism). This instrument fills the existing gap of adequate tools to evaluate AL programming which can support moving forward AL advances among children.

New Decade, Same Concerns: A Systematic Review of Agricultural Literacy of School Students

“…The ALI-LF was found to be reliable and valid for measuring the impact of informal programs conducted outside of the school setting targeted to children aged 9-13 years and offered the ability to be tailored to include relevant local content. The limitations acknowledged of the tool were that as it was developed for informal programs, future use in more formal settings (e.g., classroom, structured programs) may require question review to enable appropriate grading [34].…”

“…When evaluating programs across grade levels, Bayer, Travis, and Wang (2020) recommended the use of paired questions to determine changes in conceptual understanding. Future tools for evaluation should include measures of cognitive skills to determine the level of problem identification, analysis and action planning [34]. The tool in Longhurst et al (2020) focused on grades 3-5 and future development of tools for grades K-12 should align with the NALOs, ensuring that all of the benchmarks are included to prevent focus only on measures of selected items.…”