Medical Education Commons^™

Lessons From The Trenches: Meeting Evaluation Challenges In School Health Education, Michael Young, George Denny, Joseph Donnelly

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

BACKGROUND: Those involved in school health education programs generally believe that health education programs can play an important role in helping young people make positive health decisions. Thus, it is to document the effects of such programs through rigorous evaluations published in peer‐reviewed journals.

METHODS: This paper helps the reader understand the context of school health program evaluation, examines several problems and challenges, shows how problems can often be fixed, or prevented, and demonstrates ways in which challenges can be met. A number of topics are addressed, including distinguishing between curricula evaluation and evaluation of outcomes, types of evaluation, identifying …

Relationships And Context As A Means For Improving Disease Prevention And Sexual Health Messages, Lisa D. Lieberman

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

In many ways, the HIV epidemic changed the discourse about sex in the United States and worldwide (Ehrhardt, 1992; Everett, 1986) and continues to drive approaches to sex education. After a period of rapid growth in the late 1980s (approximately 150,000 new infections per year), by the late 1990s, HIV rates in the United States slowed to some 40,000 new infections annually (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2001), and new HIV infections continue to hover around that number. The first successful examples of behavior change that resulted in decreased HIV transmission emerged from …