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Impact Report

For plan Plant Management Systems: Urban Horticulture (Bernalillo County)
Date March 9, 2012, 10:59 pm
For Objective Short-term Show short-term objectives
Impact Report Agent, at request of Bernalillo County Parks and Recreation Land Management Division, developed a training course to prepare Land Management personnel to take the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) certification exam. The request was based on County mid-level staff wishing to improve the professionalism of their field crews, with regard to tree care, while also allowing said crew members to obtain independent certification of skills and knowledge, useful to them for professional development in addition to actual field practices. The target audience was ten individuals who are responsible for a wide range of operations, from turf and tree maintenance to irrigation system repair, etc. The Agent, who has held ISA certification himself for several years, used the ISA's own 16-chapter study guide as a text for the class, and developed PowerPoint presentations for each of the chapters. Classes were held roughly monthly starting in August, 2011, and terminating in January, 2012. Each class lasted about 4 hours, and covered two chapters. The workers took the test as part of approximately 20 individuals who tested at the 2012 Think Trees Conference, an annual tree care conference occurring in Albuquerque early each year. As an aside, this conference brings in national-caliber speakers, with an typical attendance around 350 people. The Agent has been very involved in the non-profit entity which puts on this conference since the beginning of his time with NMSU. Of the ten Bernalillo County workers who took the exam, only two were successful in passing it. Of the approximately 20 persons who took the exam, only three passed (two of whom were Bernalillo County workers who had taken the prep course being described herein). The Agent had the class members do an evaluation, after having taken the test. The evaluation asked five questions: 1) Did you learn new information and or skills? 2) Do you thing you will use this new information/skill set in the future? 3) Will this new information/skill set be directly useful to you? 4) Prior to taking the Exam, how useful did you feel the class was? 5) After taking the exam, how useful did the class actually turn out to be? 100% responded "yes" to both question 1 and question 2. For question 3, 20% felt the new information would be "somewhat" useful, 20% felt it would be "quite a bit" useful and 60% felt it would be "very much" useful. For question 4, prior to taking the exam, 20% felt that the class was "somewhat" useful, 60% felt it was "quite a bit" useful, and 20% felt is was "very much" useful. For question 5, after taking the exam, 30% felt the class had been "somewhat" useful, 50% felt it had been "quite a bit" useful, and 20% felt it had been "very much" useful. It is helpful to know that this particular audience was composed of men who spend their time working outdoors, and both the classroom setting of the class and the paper testing procedure were a bit out of their comfort zone. Nonetheless, it would appear that the class was helpful, in that 2 out of 3 people who passed the exam had taken the class. In the future, the Agent would try to find ways to make some of the learning more hands-on, as well as some direct test-taking skill development.