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Exploring nutrition education resources, barriers, and nutrition knowledge in California public school teachers (625.4)
Author(s) -
Jones Anna,
ZidenbergCherr Sheri
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.28.1_supplement.625.4
Subject(s) - nutrition education , promotion (chess) , descriptive statistics , clinical nutrition , medical education , regression analysis , inclusion (mineral) , medicine , sample (material) , multilevel model , psychology , environmental health , gerontology , statistics , political science , mathematics , social psychology , chemistry , chromatography , politics , law
The study objective was to determine barriers to nutrition education, nutrition education resources used, and relationships between nutrition knowledge and whether or not nutrition is taught in the classroom by public school teachers in California. One hundred and two teachers participated in the web‐based survey about nutrition education barriers, resources used to plan nutrition lessons, and factors that would encourage inclusion of nutrition. A validated questionnaire was used to assess nutrition knowledge. Analyses included descriptive statistics and linear regression. Only cases that had data for all variables were included in the regression analysis, and one outlier was excluded (n=67). More than half of the sample indicated lack of instructional time (70%), lack of resources (61%), and unrelated subject matter (59%) were barriers to nutrition education. Teachers were unaware of many nutrition education resources, suggesting a need for promotion of existing resources. Mean nutrition knowledge score was 37.5 out of 58 for cases included in the regression analysis. Nutrition knowledge was not associated with nutrition lessons, but was associated with teaching high school, female gender, and identifying as Hispanic or Latino (p<.001; F(3) = 15.06). The proportion of variance explained by this model was 42%. Larger studies are needed to determine if these findings hold true in a broader sample.