The Tuesday Letter
Agricultural Experiment Station & Cooperative Extension Service
Tuesday, May 06, 2014
(Vol. 20 No. 26)
IN THIS ISSUE...
CONSIDER SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL FOR ANNUAL CONFERENCE
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Cooperative Extension Service, the committee chose “Honoring the Past, Forging the Future,” as the theme for the 2014 K-State Research and Annual Conference, October 21 to 23.
Please consider sharing your expertise with your colleagues by submitting proposals for breakout sessions and posters. The committee has created criteria to help you develop your presentations. Please review the criteria on the conference website before filling out the proposal form for a 75-minute presentation or a poster. The submission deadline is June 20.
The poster session will be Tuesday evening, October 21, and the breakout sessions will be Wednesday afternoon, October 22.
If you are interested in attending a session on a particular topic, you may suggest topics and possible presenters.
The conference website also has contact information and prices for local hotels. We have room blocks at Holiday Inn at the Campus, Fairfield Inn by Marriott, and Bluemont Hotel (the new hotel opening in September on the corner of Bluemont and Manhattan Avenue). --Ken Odde, conference chair kenodde@ksu.edu
DAY OF PRIDE - JUNE 14, 2014
Day of PRIDE 2014 will be a great opportunity to take part in if your communities are interested in fundraising! As a part of the Day of PRIDE 2014 theme of “Dollars for Dreams," each site (Humboldt, Larned and Rossville) will be hosting a fundraiser to illustrate innovative ways to raise funds for your community projects, in a fun, simple way! The day will start at 9 a.m. and will adjourn around 3 p.m.
Registration is $30 per person, and includes break snacks and lunch. Day of PRIDE will provide an opportunity to learn about the host community PRIDE's success in funding projects, will feature our keynote speaker Julie Roller of the Kansas Rural Communities Foundation, round table discussions to learn from other PRIDE communities, award recognition, and a presentation on financial resources.
For more information, visit our website at kansasprideprogram.ksu.edu.
Or follow us on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/KansasPRIDE. --Jaime Menon jmenon@ksu.edu
ASK THE OEIE EVALUATOR: COLLECTING FOLLOW-UP IMPACT DATA USING K-PICS
In this installment, we discuss a few tips on collecting follow-up data from participants several weeks or months after their program participation and how K-PICS can make this evaluation activity more manageable.
Q: How can I use K-PICS to collect follow-up impact data from participants several weeks or months after their initial participation?
When evaluating programs, most often the evaluation is conducted at the conclusion of the program, typically, with an end-of-program survey. While these immediate activities can provide valuable information about the short-term impacts of your program, such as participant gains in knowledge or new attitudes, you may increase the value of your evaluation significantly by continuing your efforts a few months after the program. By collecting follow-up data from your participants, you may learn how participants applied new knowledge, skills, or attitudes to make behavioral changes.
Seeking to gather contact information, such as addresses, emails, or telephone numbers, from participants at the initial point of contact can allow for the possibility of conducting a successful follow-up evaluation, as well as a thoughtful approach using one of a variety of options such as an invitation to an in-person interview or observation, or a telephone interview, or mail-in or online survey. Sampling a portion of your participant group for interviews, observations, or surveys, rather than contacting your entire group should its size be large, may also make follow-up evaluations much more practical. Limiting your follow-up to a few key questions may make it easier for both you to conduct the follow-up and for your participants to complete, reducing their time and commitment to the process. Additionally, if available, a small incentive can motivate participation in your follow-up, increasing the numbers of participants you may have targeted.
With a few simple actions, you can make this valuable evaluation step more manageable using K-PICS, which provides pre-developed evaluation templates and an organized method of entering and analyzing follow-up data for your use in a variety of ways to report program impacts.
Using K-PICS, you can plan and generate your follow-up evaluation materials at the same time you generate your initial evaluation materials. By consecutively generating these in K-PICS, you ensure that your priorities for the entire program evaluation remain consistent and complementary to the program area. The following program areas currently have follow-up templates available in K-PICS that may be applicable to your program:
• Adult Development and Aging
• Crop Production
• Natural Resources
• Nutrition, Food Safety and Health
• FNP SNAP-Ed
Visit the Manage Evaluation Instruments area of K-PICS to generate a follow-up instrument that is specific to the needs of the program you are delivering and based on pre-developed templates. You can access these pre-developed follow-up templates by going to the Impact Data section and clicking Manage Evaluation Instruments in the upper left corner. Look for the New Instrument button to begin the process. For step-by-step instructions on how to generate an evaluation instrument in K-PICS, visit the Support section, which houses the K-PICS User Manual, past K-PICS training webinars, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
You will need to enter the collected follow-up data into K-PICS within the same program that housed the initial evaluation data, as creating a new program to enter this follow-up data would duplicate program and participant numbers. Data collected and entered into K-PICS can then be accessed using the Individual Data Extractions feature within the Reports & Analysis section. For help with K-PICS, contact our K-PICS Support Team at 785-532-5138 or kpics@oeie.ksu.edu.
Questions about evaluation? Visit the Extension Evaluation Resources website, http://apps.oeie.ksu.edu/extension/index.php; or contact Kathleen Gary, ksgary@ksu.edu, or 785-532-5127, at OEIE. --Office of Educational Innovation and Evaluation
MARIE'S PICKS . . .
This week
my picks are a success story and outcomes reported by Tom Maxwell, Central
Kansas District:
Producers who used the profile nitrogen soil test in
2012 were able to determine how much residual nitrogen was in the soil and
accordingly make adjustments in nitrogen rates applied to the following wheat
and milo crops. Some producers were able to reduce nitrogen rates by as much as
20 - 50 lbs of nitrogen/acre, reducing fertilizer costs by $10 to $25 per acre.
Controlling input costs such as nitrogen fertilizer rate is one of the ways
farmers can improve profitability.
The Central
Kansas District--Salina office has been receiving cost share money from the
soil conservation district to be used to promote soil testing. Two choices for
soil testing are a routine soil test covering pH, lime requirement, P and K, or
a profile soil test that is a routine soil test plus profile nitrate-nitrogen
and organic matter percent. For the program year from October 2012 to September
2013, 36 farmers collected soil samples from more than 149 fields to be tested
at the K-State soil testing lab. Soil sample numbers have been falling the past
two years due to the ongoing drought, but promotion of the benefits of soil
testing as well as the increasing costs for fertilizer seem to be encouraging
farmers to use soil testing as a tool to manage their fertilizer dollars more
efficiently.
Specific
examples of how soil tests increased potential crop profitability through
proper liming and fertilizing are:
1) With significantly more acres of soybeans being planted in the crop
rotation, soil pH is more critical than where only wheat was planted in past
years. Soil tests indicated fields that were below the recommended pH threshhold
of 5.8 and some were below pH 5.0. Soybeans will greatly benefit from liming
soils below 5.8 as will wheat, milo, and corn on ground with a soil pH below
5.5. Several producers benefited from one-on-one guidance to put together
liming programs for their fields with acid soils.
2) Many farmers took expired CRP fields and planted the acreage to wheat or
soybeans. Farmers learned at meetings and tours about the likelihood of low
soil test phosphorus levels in these CRP fields. Soil tests submitted by
farmers corroborated this concern, with many CRP fields having soil test
phosphorus (STP) values in the very low range.
3) Some farmers are requesting profile nitrogen tests to take advantage of
residual nitrogen from a previous crop. In many cases producers were able to
save fertilizer dollars by soil testing for profile N and adjusting their
nitrogen fertilizer applications on both wheat and feed grains. -–Marie Blythe mblythe@ksu.edu
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