Journal of Community Mobilization and Sustainable Development

A study was designed to develop a standardized test to measure the knowledge of maize growing farmers. A preliminary test of Eighty one knowledge items were initially administered to 30 maize growers for item analysis. Finally nineteen knowledge items were included in the final format of the knowledge test based on difficulty index (30 to 80), discrimination index (0.30 to 0.75). The reliability of the knowledge test was measured with the help of split-half method and the reliability coefficient was found to be 0.865, which indicates that the knowledge test is reliable. Meanwhile, the correlation between odd and even set was found positive. The validity of the test was established on account of both “content validity” as well as “construct validity”. Point bi-serial correlation coefficient was used to test the construct validity of the test. Content validity essentially involves the systematic examination of the test content to determine whether it covers a representative sample of the behaviour domain to be measured which is knowledge here. Accordingly, all possible statements, covering wide aspects of maize cultivation were collected. The test was further administered to 298 respondents and it was found that majority of the respondents 46.98 per cent had medium level of knowledge about recommended cultivation of practices for maize cultivation.