Effective Pesticide Education in Today's Environment.

Pesticide education is an important aspect for Extension outreach efforts and plays a vital role for farmers and crop consultants to maintain certification. In Washington State 50 minutes of instruction needs to be delivered to receive a single credit. However as adult learners, the average attention span is 20 minutes and continues to decrease. This is mostly an ineffective model for delivering high quality education that the target audience will retain little regardless of presentation skills. A second limiting factor for effectiveness pesticide education is the audience has minimal input on what education topic will be delivered. What if, as an Extension Educator, you could develop multiple 15 minute focused pesticide presentations on a diversity of topics and quickly let the audience choose what they value? A number of Extension Educators are utilizing TurningPoint Technology in their PowerPoint presentation but focus is mostly on poling the audience to collect program impact data. A second feature available with this software is “Conditional Branching” and this allows participants to use the clicker response card to select the educational materials to be presented. The benefit is it allows you as an Extension Educator to deliver 50 minutes of pesticide education on three different short targeted topics that are most relevant to the participating audience. This greatly improves the learning environment. A disadvantage to this approach is it takes more time to develop the PowerPoint presentation and you may have to broaden your knowledge and understanding on a diversity of pesticide educational topics. A second disadvantages to this approach is inevitably you have a handful of participants who desired to have information on one of the topics that were not selected. In conclusion the conditional branching option within TurningPoint allows the audience to customize and retain their learning experience.