The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #55544

Armando Valdez, PhD, PRISM (Pacific Research Institute for Social Marketing), 201 San Antonio Circle, Suite 152, Mountain View, CA 94040, 650 917-6600, avaldez@aol.com

This intervention was designed to increase the presence of nutrition education content in science, math, language arts and social studies lessons in regular fourth-grade instruction. The intervention, entitled Nutrition Jam, is a CD-ROM containing 50 interactive, multimedia lessons with an embedded nutrition topic. These lessons meet subject-matter standards for fourth grade, and are intended to augment existing curricular goals, reinforce concepts, and enable students to practice acquired skills. The lessons are fun and easy to use for both teachers and students, and are presented in three instructional formats: Internet lessons in which students conduct research online, interactive lessons accessed from the CD-ROM, and traditional worksheet-based lessons that do not require computer use by students. Nutrition Jam lessons cover science experiments, games, simulations, cooking projects, reading and writing activities, a three-act play, and several hands-on projects in which students build their own food pyramid and serving-size clay models. A companion teachers’ CD-ROM contains an interactive curriculum guide that allows teachers to review lessons on-screen, view student worksheets and related instructional materials, and print lesson plans and worksheets for lessons they elect to use. Teachers also can print out a hard-copy of the entire curriculum guide and place it in a binder for review. The curriculum guide includes lesson plans, student worksheets, reference materials, fact sheets, and templates for student-made materials. The presentation will describe how interactive computer technologies were used to design an intervention can be integrated into regular classroom instruction, and its effectiveness in improving nutrition knowledge and food choices.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize how Internet and CD-ROM technologies can be used to deliver fun and exciting nutrition education lessons to upper-elementary school children.
• Describe the model for developing a nutrition education intervention designed to increase students’ nutritional knowledge and improve their food choices.
• Describe the results of an evaluation to assess the effectiveness of this nutrition intervention to increase students’ knowledge and impact their food choices.

Keywords: School-Based Programs, Health Promotion

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.