ABSTRACT

The study focused on identifying the technical skills required by teachers of agriculture for effective management of school farm resources in Bayelsa State secondary schools. The area of the study was Bayelsa State with focus on Secondary school teachers of agriculture; Descriptive   survey research design was adopted for the study. The study had 4 specific purposes which are to identify the technical skills required by teachers of agriculture for effective management of school farm, land resources, labour resources, capital resources and products.  In line with the purposes, 4 research questions and 4 hypotheses were answered and tested respectively for the study. The population of the study was 511 made up of 292 male and 219 female teachers of agriculture in public secondary schools. Taro Yamane formula was used to draw 225 teachers from the population, stratified proportionate sampling was used to sample the 225 teachers (126 male and 99 female). The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire titled “technical skills required for management of school farm resources questionnaire (TSRMSFRQ)” containing 64 items. The questionnaire was structured in a 4 point scale of highly required, moderately required, slightly required and not required with a scale value of 4, 3, 2 and 1 respectively. The instrument was validated by 3 validators, while Cronbach alpha coefficient was used to test the reliability and a reliability of .82 was obtained, indicating that the instrument is highly reliable for the study. Data were collected with the help of 5 research assistants, 221 copies of the instrument were retrieved and analyzed using mean and standard deviation for research questions and t-test for testing the null hypotheses. It was found from the results of the analyses that there are 15 technical skills in land resources management, 17 technical skills in labour resources management, 13 technical skills in capital resources management and 19 technical skills in farm produce management that are required by teachers of agriculture in Bayelsa State Secondary Schools. It was also found that there was no significant difference in all the hypotheses tested. The study concluded that the 64 items are the technical skills required by the teachers of agriculture. four recommendations were made that teacher training institutions should build the identified technical skills into their agricultural education programme and that government under the Ministry of Education in collaboration with school administrators should make provision for a well -planned and structured program for in-service training of teachers using the identified technical skills among others.