engleski

Teachers’ assessments of the Informed Health Choices key concepts intended for teaching primary school children about health claims: preliminary results

Background: The Informed Health Choices (IHC) Project developed a list of key concepts to help people understand and judge trustworthiness of treatment claims, with 12 of the key concepts being included in the IHC primary school resources. Objectives: To evaluate attitudes of primary school teachers about 12 IHC key concepts intended for primary school children. Methods: The IHC key concepts were presented in primary school settings in urban agglomeration of the City of Split during county expert meetings and teachers’ school councils. We asked participating teachers to complete a questionnaire consisting of three parts. Demographic characteristics included teachers’ gender, age and work experience. For assessing their overall understanding of the presented concepts, teachers were asked to choose one of the following statements: Not understood, Somewhat understood, Understood, and Understood very well. Furthermore, based on their competencies and their interests, teachers were asked to use a Likert scale of 1 to 6 (1 = lowest, 6 = highest) and provide a numeric score regarding the four criteria: 1) relevance and importance, 2) usefulness, 3) understandability and 4) impact on children of each of the 12 key concepts for both third grade (age 9) and sixth grade (age 12) primary school children. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Split School of Medicine and was funded by the Croatian Science Foundation project called “Professionalism in Health – Decision making in practice and research, ProDeM” under Grant agreement No. IP-2019-04-4882. Results: In total, 304 teachers completed the questionnaire. A total of 83.5% (N = 254) reported having understood the IHC key concepts well or very well (Figure 1). Participants’ median age was 42.5 (interquartile range 18), with 22.7% of teachers (N = 69) having five years of work experience or less, 15.79% (N = 48) from five to 10 years, and 61.51% (N = 187) more than 10 years of work experience. In relation to the four criteria, all concepts scored well with mean values ranging from 4.30 to 4.97 on a 1 to 6 scale for sixth grade children, and from 3.92 to 4.77 for third grade children (Table 1). Overall assessments of all four categories for each of the concepts were scored relatively high with mean values ranging from 17.65 ± 4.48 on a 4 to 24 scale to 19.44 ± 3.72 for sixth grade children, and from 16.58 ± 5.20 to 18.61 ± 4.26 for third grade children (Figure 2). Metric characteristics for the overall assessments of all concepts showed they were homogenous, confident (Cronbach alpha from 0.836 to 0.941) and sensitive. Conclusions: Most teachers understand IHC key concepts well. Teachers considered that teaching primary school children about the IHC concepts was relevant. Slightly lower assessments for the third grade children indicate that, in order to use the IHC key concepts for teaching at this level of primary education, it necessary to explore means of adapting and simplifying the teaching materials.

Informed Health Choices ; health claim ; key concepts ; primary school children ; primary school teachers

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