ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Humanities and Social Sciences
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1656517
This article is part of the Research TopicVeterinary teaching in 2025: where we are and where we expect to goView all 19 articles
Assessing Veterinary Education Outcomes in Livestock Systems: A Quasi-Experimental Study of Scientific Buffalo Husbandry Training
Provisionally accepted
- 1Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes (ICAR), Hisar, India
- 2ICAR - Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes, Hisar, India
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Scientific buffalo husbandry management practices play a pivotal role in enhancing rural livelihoods and milk productivity in India. Despite widespread training initiatives, there is limited empirical evidence quantifying the cognitive impact of such programs on smallholder farmers. This study, grounded in Adult Learning Theory (Andragogy), adopted a quasiexperimental one-group pre-test-post-test design involving 518 farmers trained at the IndianA validated 15-item knowledge test was used to assess learning across five thematic domains: breeding, feeding and nutrition, animal health, milk quality, and milk marketing. The training intervention resulted in a substantial improvement in farmers' knowledge, as evidenced by both absolute and normalized learning gains. Subject-wise analysis revealed feeding and nutrition as the most improved domain, followed by milk marketing and breeding. Multiple linear regression analysis identified specific socio-demographic and experiential factors-such as gender, livestock holding, and prior experience-as significant predictors of knowledge gain, while age and baseline knowledge showed negative associations. Disaggregated profiling further showed that young, moderately experienced female farmers with medium-to-large herd sizes achieved the highest learning gains. These findings suggest that training outcomes vary considerably across learner profiles and subject areas. The study highlights the importance of targeted, learner-sensitive extension models not only for enhancing knowledge transfer, but also for promoting the adoption of best practices, and for enabling systematic monitoring and evaluation of how the trained subject matter areas are implemented at the field level.
Keywords: Scientific buffalo husbandry, Cognitive gain, training effectiveness, Knowledge test, Data-driven extension
Received: 30 Jun 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 M, S, SAXENA and SHARMA. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Aiswarya S, Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes (ICAR), Hisar, India
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.