Substance Abuse Prevention Media Literacy Curriculum

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In response to published NIDA research topics calling for innovation in educational programs aimed at substance abuse prevention, the proposed project will develop and empirically tested media literacy alcohol and tobacco use prevention curriculum with use with children in grades three through five. The curriculum will contain goals, lesson plan scripts and activities, core connections to related subject areas, homework suggestions, resources and skill-based evaluation tools. The curriculum will be designed to be ready for use in a range of educational settings including elementary schools, home schools, after school programs, faith-based programs and community based programs (e.g., Boys and Girls Clubs). During Phase I, the overall structure and goals of the curriculum were developed and outlined. The first three lessons were developed in detail and were delivered to 3rd through 5th grade children in a focus group setting by an experienced teacher. In addition, focus groups and consultations with curriculum developers, 3rd-5th grade teachers, and health educators were conducted to provide feedback about the format, goals and content of the curriculum. Consumer satisfaction ratings from both the educators and children were extremely positive suggesting that the prototype of the curriculum was promising and ready for further development and completion. The present application proposes three primary goals including (1) completion of the curriculum and evaluation materials, (2) pilot testing of the curriculum and evaluation protocol in two youth groups, and (3) conduct experiment with random assignment of educators to intervention and wait-list control groups to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum in changing knowledge, attitudes and behaviors regarding use of tobacco and alcohol products and increasing media literacy-related critical thinking skills. The potential commercial applications of this research include the creation of an easy-to-use, attractive, effective preventive intervention curriculum as well as training workshops in use and evaluation of the curriculum that can be taught to a wide range of educators.