It's Your Game. Keep It Real

The IYG curriculum website supports a broader strategy to disseminate "It's Your Game. Keep It Real" (IYG), an evidence-based HIV/Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI)/Pregnancy prevention curriculum for middle school students. The website provides a full 7th and 8th grade curriculum of 24 lessons in a user-friendly and readily transferable format to teachers, other school staff, and parents, and computer lessons directly to students. Components include downloadable lesson plans and support materials (handouts and homework assignments) for 14 lessons, role model videos demonstrating how to run classroom activities, and eight computer-based lessons featuring over 50 FLASH-based activities and videos. The website also provides background on the extent of the HIV/STI and teen pregnancy problems in the school district, school policies, and the history and evidence for the IYG curriculum to date. Material Development: Developed using Intervention Mapping (IM), IYG is grounded on social cognitive theory and social influence models. Extensive qualitative work and participatory methods with all stakeholders provided formative guidance in developing the curriculum. Once shown effective, IYG was adapted to the web to provide easily accessible and downloadable content to program planners and curriculum users. Evaluation: IYG has demonstrated effectiveness in two randomized controlled trials conducted in Southeast Texas. After adjusting for covariates, students in the comparison condition were 1.29 times more likely to initiate sex by the ninth grade than those in the intervention condition. Usability testing of the IYG website provided high ratings of enjoyment, ease, understandability, credibility, usefulness, and motivational appeal among middle students (≥79% agreement).