Background
Professional development can improve teacher self-efficacy and knowledge to enhance their delivery of food guidance. This may result in improvements in students’ knowledge about and skills for healthy eating.
Objective
To explore effects of a training on a nutrition curriculum, Forecasting Your Future: Nutrition Matters, on teachers’ self-efficacy to teach nutrition and knowledge of 2015 Dietary Guidelines. To explore teachers’ outcome expectations for students.
Study Design, Setting, Participants
Family and Consumer Sciences high school teachers were recruited for training at a state conference and divided into 9-strata based on school location and size, then randomly assigned to intervention (INT, n = 18) or control (CON, n = 18). INT were trained (spring 2018), then implemented the new curriculum in the classroom (fall 2018); CON implemented the usual curriculum. Both completed a 60-item pre-test (spring 2018) and 55-item post-test (late fall 2018). Follow-up semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted (n = 32) to expand on multi-opt results. Teachers answered 6 open-ended questions about outcome expectations for their students.
Measurable Outcome/Analysis
Survey data were analyzed by hierarchical linear modeling to determine whether changes from INT differed from CON for self-efficacy to teach nutrition and nutrition knowledge. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and imported into NVivo software, then thematically analyzed.
Results
After training then teaching the curriculum, INT had greater increases in nutrition knowledge of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines (P = .028) and self-efficacy to teach nutrition (P = .010) vs CON. Interviews with INT revealed they did not expect immediate behavior changes but hoped to affect students’ future health by giving them the knowledge and skills necessary to make healthy choices.
Conclusions
Professional development sessions and providing updated curricula has promise for improving teachers’ nutrition knowledge and self-efficacy to teach nutrition. More research should be done on outcome expectations to guide future curriculum development.
Funding USDA Team Nutrition.
Appendix. Supplementary data
Article info
Identification
Copyright
© 2020 Published by Elsevier Inc.
