Extension Teaching Methods

Two ways of classifying

Extension teaching methods are classified either by the number of people reached, giving individual, group and mass methods, or by the form of the message, giving written, spoken and objective or visual methods. The first classification is the one usually asked for.

Individual contact methods

• Farm and home visit. The most effective and the most expensive. Builds the personal relationship on which everything else rests.
• Farmers' call. The farmer comes to the extension office. Cheap, but self-selecting: the farmers who come are the ones who least need to.
• Telephone call and adhoc contact. Quick clarification, no observation.
• Personal letter and result demonstration on the farmer's own field.

Individual methods change attitude best and reach fewest people. That trade-off is the whole of method selection.

Group contact methods

• Method demonstration. Teaches a skill. Shows how to do something. Short, and can be repeated.
• Result demonstration. Teaches a principle. Shows that a practice works, using a comparison on a local field over a full season. Costly and slow, but the most convincing thing extension has.
• Group discussion, meetings, seminars and workshops.
• Field day or farmers' day. Held at the peak of the demonstration effect.
• Study tour. Farmers see a practice working elsewhere.
• Small group training and farmer field school.

Mass contact methods

• Farm publications. Leaflets, folders, bulletins, circular letters.
• Radio and television. Wide reach, no feedback, no adaptation.
• Exhibition and campaign. Good at creating awareness at scale.
• Posters, wall writing and hoardings.

Mass methods create awareness efficiently and persuade badly. They belong at the knowledge stage of the innovation-decision process, not the persuasion stage.

Matching method to stage

This table is a very common question. The pattern is that as the farmer moves through the stages, the effective method moves from mass to individual.

Do not confuse the two stage models. The five stages used in this table (awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, adoption) are the older adoption process. Rogers later replaced it with the innovation-decision process: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, confirmation. Both are in the syllabus and both get asked. Method selection is conventionally taught against the older five stages, which is why they appear here. See diffusion of innovations for the revised model.

Audio visual aids and Dale's Cone

Edgar Dale arranged learning experiences in a cone, from the most concrete at the base to the most abstract at the apex: direct purposeful experience, contrived experience, dramatised experience, demonstration, field trip, exhibit, television, motion picture, recording and radio, visual symbols, and verbal symbols at the top.

The teaching point is that the closer to the base, the more is retained, and the fewer people can be reached at once. Aids are commonly classified as audio, visual, and audio-visual; and separately as projected and non-projected.

Choosing a method

• The objective: awareness, skill, or change of attitude.
• The stage the audience has reached in the adoption process.
• The characteristics of the audience: literacy, holding size, time available.
• The nature of the subject matter: a skill needs demonstration, a principle needs proof.
• Resources: staff, money, transport, time.
• Almost always a combination works better than any single method.

Points to carry into the exam

The lines from this topic that recur in the paper.

• Method demonstration teaches how; result demonstration teaches that it works.
• Individual methods are most effective and least efficient. Mass methods are the reverse.
• The stage-to-method table is a recurring question.
• Dale's Cone: direct purposeful experience at the base, verbal symbols at the apex.
• Result demonstration relates to the observability and trialability attributes in Rogers' framework.