Development of a Health Knowledge Assessment Tool for Middle School Students

Although there has been a call for increasing the focus on health education and assessment in schools, the current assessment climate at the state and community levels is often not conducive to achieving that goal. New approaches must be considered to realize an ongoing, systematic evaluation process that will aid teachers, communities, policy-makers, and ultimately students. In this presentation, we describe the development of a tool designed for ongoing standardized assessment of students' health knowledge related to diet and physical activity. Steps to be described include: (1) identification of relevant health education standards; (2) results from a literature review conducted to identify validated items; (3) development of additional questions; (4) review of items by content experts; (5) outcomes of two focus groups of representative sample of adolescents; (6) pilot test of the assessment tool with over 500 students; and (7) item analysis to assess psychometric properties. These steps provide the critical steps toward establishing the reliability and validity of the assessment tool. Content validity ensures that the items provide an adequate sampling of students' health knowledge for the relevant health education standards and measures of internal consistency provide an index of the reliability of the assessment tool overall. We will also provide a rationale for why we chose to develop a new set of items rather than relying on existing item banks that measure health knowledge. Finally, we will discuss the benefits of the assessment tool for educators (both in schools and health education centers), community members and policy-makers.