International Journal of Computational Engineering Research||Vol, 03||Issue, 7|| ||Issn 2250-3005 || ||July||2013|| Page 20 Measures To Improve the Declining Usage and Operation of School Farm in Secondary Schools in Ekiti State, Nigeria BY FAMIWOLE, Remigius O. (Ph.D) Department Of Curriculum Studies Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria I. INTRODUCTION The school farm is a laboratory, specifically designed and operated, for the purpose of carrying out practicals in agricultural science or education in order to impart knowledge and managerial skills to students through practice. It is an area specifically earmarked for agricultural activities, usually sited in the school or at a walking distance to the school compound. Olaitan (2001), in a study noted that students acquire agricultural knowledge in classrooms in such areas like crop production, forestry, fish farming, agricultural business, farm management, livestock production and so on. He stated that the school farm is an agricultural laboratory that interprets the acquired theoretical knowledge into practice through practical activities to gain experience. Students are guided on standard school farms through hands on experience to put the knowledge gained in the classrooms into practice on the school farm under the watch of the teacher. The teacher makes use of different methods and technologies, such as demonstration, observation, imitation, and supervised practice to explain techniques and complement the different learning experience required to teach the practicals very effectively. The school farm helps to inculcate into the students the need to value what they could not do or practice by themselves and for themselves. The school farm encourages the use of the head to think, eyes to see and to lay hands on actual operation or techniques to make learning easier and more permanent. According to Mama (2001), students are made to use their heads, hands and hearts (3Hs) during practical activities on the school farm to produce crops, livestock, keep records and participate in managerial activities. The respect for dignity of human labour is also built into the learners through this process. They also learn how to protect the farm from pests, and diseases, predators, human invaders and how to store farm produce and process them. Effective use of the school farm allows for skill development among the growing youths, and transfer of ABSTRACT It has been observed that only few secondary schools have operational standard school farms, where practical agriculture can be learnt to complement classroom instructions in secondary schools. The main focus of this paper was to evolve the measures that can be adopted to improve the declining usage and operation of standard school farm in all secondary schools in Ekiti state. The study was a descriptive survey research. The population used comprised all the 602 teachers of agricultural science in both public and private secondary schools in the States. A combination of purposive, stratified and simple random sampling techniques were uesed to select the 160 teachers of agriculture who responded to the 4 sets of questionnaires used. The constructed questionnaires were face and content validated. A test retest method was used and a reliability co-efficient of 0.86 was obtained using Pearson Product Moment Co-relation Co-efficient formula. Frequency counts, percentages, ranking order, mean, standard deviation and t value were used to analyze the data used for the study, and test the formulated hypothesis respectively. The findings of the study revealed, among others, the major causes of the decline and the measures that can be adopted to improve the usage and operation of school farms. The study recommended that the Ministry of Education should give specifications for standard school farms; the Ministry in collaboration with relevant agencies should supervise and assist in funding supply of tools and implements for managing school farm in Ekiti State. KEY WORDS: Learning experience, skill development, learning by doing, practical agriculture, crop rotation.