Developing a Test to Measure the Knowledge of Stakeholders on Eco-friendly Rice Farming

Rice wetland eco-system being highly fragile, the adverse effects of input intensive farming is prominent and far-reaching. It is very important in today's context to assess the knowledge level of stakeholders in eco-friendly rice farming, as this is integral in the adoption of such practices in rice. Hence a study was designed to develop a test and standardize it to measure the knowledge of stakeholders in eco-friendly rice farming. Item analysis comprising of difficulty index and discrimination index was employed in the test construction and the final test comprising of 15 items, with difficulty index value in the range of 10-75 and discrimination index ranging from 0.20 to 0.90 was standardized for administration.

Despite green revolution contributed significantly in increasing production and productivity in the initial years, the adverse effects visibly stands out as deterioration of soil quality, environmental pollution due to over use of inorganic inputs, loss of biodiversity and genetic erosion.Rice wetland eco-system being highly fragile, the adverse effects of input intensive farming is prominent and far-reaching.The knowledge of the stakeholders in eco-friendly rice farming is very important as far as the future of sustainable rice farming is concerned.Hence there is an urgent need for developing a test that would help in quantifying the knowledge of stakeholders especially farmers and labourers on eco-friendly rice farming.
Knowledge test in the study was measured using a teacher made test as suggested by Anastasi (1961).The present study was undertaken with the following objectives: 1.
To develop a test to assess the knowledge level of stakeholders viz.farmers, labourers and social activists/environmentalists on ecofriendly rice farming.

2.
To standardize the test constructed to assess the knowledge level of stakeholders viz.farmers, labourers and social activists/ environmentalists on eco-friendly rice farming.

Methodology
A standardized knowledge test was developed for measuring the knowledge of farmers and agricultural labourers about eco-friendly practices in rice cultivation by following the procedures presented below.The content of knowledge test was composed of questions called 'items'.A pool of questions was prepared by reviewing pertinent literature and discussing with experts in the respective fields.Finally, a thorough scrutiny of the item pool was made with the assistance of experts to find out items which were supposed to differentiate the well informed respondent from the poorly informed ones and having a certain level of difficulty.A total of 61 items covering the four dimensions of eco-friendly rice cultivation viz.land and soil management, water management, biodiversity and plant protection were selected.
The 61 questions on eco-friendly practices in rice cultivation were administered to 24 randomly selected non-sample respondents prior to the preparation of the final schedule.Item analysis was performed for the statements selected and its validity was also tested.Item analysis yields two kinds of information, item difficulty and item discrimination.The index of item difficulty reveals how difficult an item is, whereas the index of discrimination indicates the extent to which an item discriminates the well-informed individuals from the poorly informed ones.
Scores of value '1' and '0' were given to the correct and incorrect responses, respectively.The scores obtained by the twenty-four respondents were arranged in the descending order of total scores, from the highest to the lowest and the respondents were divided into three groups arranged in descending order of total scores obtained by them.The three groups were G1, G2 and G3.For item analysis, the middle group (G2) was eliminated retaining only the terminal ones with high and low scores (G1, and G3).
The data pertaining to correct responses for all the items in respect of these two groups (G1, and G3) were tabulated and the difficulty and discrimination indices were calculated.
Index of item difficulty, N P = N P Where, Np indicates the number of test takers in the total group who pass the item N indicates the total number of test takers in the group Where, S1 and S3 are the frequencies of correct answers in the groups G1 and G3 respectively.

N = Total number of respondents in the sample
The knowledge test developed was standardized by analyzing its content validity.Content validity is a kind of validity by assumption as described by Guilford (1971).

Results and Discussion
The results of the study have been presented in this section under the subheads viz.item difficulty index (P value), item discrimination index (E 1/3 ) of the items, validity and administration of the test.

Table 1. Difficulty and discrimination indices of the knowledge test on eco-friendly practices in rice cultivation
Sl.No.
Questions Difficulty index Discrimination index 1.
Name an organic manure used in rice fields 25 0.00

2.
What is the quantity of organic manure that has to be applied in rice fields (in hectare/acre/cents)? 2 0.17

3.
What do we apply to the soil when it is acidic?24 0.17

4.
What is the quantity of lime that has to be applied to a hectare/acre/cent? 8 0.83

5.
When do we apply lime in rice fields? 5 0.00

6.
Give between superiors and inferiors (Blood and Budd, 1972).It was indicated by E 1/3 .Different researchers indicated different E 1/3 value ranges for final selection of items.In the study, the items, with E 1/3 values ranging from 0.20 to 0.90 were considered for the final selection.(Table .1).Thus 15 items satisfying both the above values were finally selected for the test.

Validity
Seltiz et. al. (1977) defined validity of a measuring instrument as the extent to which differences in scores reflects true differences among individuals as the characteristics that we seek to measure, rather than random or constant errors.The knowledge tests developed in the study were tested for their content validity.
Content validity is a kind of validity by assumption as described by Guilford (1971).Care was taken to include items covering the entire universe of relevant aspects of knowledge with regard to eco-friendly practices in rice cultivation.Items were collected through various sources such as experts from agricultural universities and relevant literature.Hence it was assumed that the tests could measure the knowledge of the respondents with validity.

Method of scoring
The respondents were asked to indicate their responses to the items in relevant knowledge tests and the correct answers were assigned score '1' and incorrect answers '0'.The total knowledge score for each respondent was calculated by summing up the scores given for each item.

Categorization of respondents
Knowledge levels of respondents on ecofriendly practices in rice cultivation were calculated and the respondents were classified into 'low', 'medium' and 'high' groups based on frequencies in selected categories.

Conclusion
A test comprising of 15 items was developed and standardized here to measure the knowledge of the stakeholders viz.farmers, labourers and social activists/ environmentalists in rice farming.The test developed was found to be valid.The test developed to assess the knowledge in eco-friendly rice farming is not specific for use with any particular category of respondents.The test is not location specific and can be used in any geographical area with slight modification.Other parallel tests could also be derived and standardized from the results of the study.The test developed would help quantify the knowledge level of various categories of stakeholders in rice farming and the data so obtained could be replicated elsewhere to understand the knowledge level of the people, which in turn will help in formulating strategies for creating environmental awareness.