Teaching report writing in crop science to undergraduate agriculture students in a Nigerian University

In response to the urgent need for acquisition of technical writing skill by students, the Faculty of Agriculture, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria introduced a onesemester course on Report Writing in Crop Science (coded CPP 408) to the fourth year of the 5-year Bachelor’s degree curriculum in Agriculture. Whenever offered, the course was taught to a fairly large class (usually e”300 students), using Content Analysis, a research tool used to determine the presence of certain words or concepts within texts or sets of texts. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of the students in the course and its effectiveness on the students’ performance in the compulsory final year research project (coded CPP 514) the students executed a year later. Students were assigned full-text research papers from journals and were guided into identifying and scoring on a standard scoring sheet the presence (1) or absence (0) of concepts expected in each section of technical papers. At the end of the semester, each student was assigned 25 papers from standard journals to score as done in class, statistically analyze the scores and write up the research in a technical journal format. Performance of the students in CPP 408 ranged from 20 to 63% with a mean of 41.3±1.04 Their performance in CPP 514 was better, ranging from 45 to 75% with mean=66±1.15. Performance in the two courses was positively correlated (r=0.48; r2=0.23). study revealed that undergraduate students can be effectively taught technical report writing, using content analysis. Further refinements of this approach will likely improve skill acquisition of students for improvement in writing technical reports.