ACES: Abstinence and Contraception Education Storehouse

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has declined significantly over the last decade, it remains higher than that of many other industrialized countries and U.S. teens remain at high risk of acquiring HIV and other STIs. A number of behavioral interventions for teens have shown efficacy in reducing unsafe sexual practices that lead to pregnancy and STIs/HIV. These interventions recognize the importance of social influences on youth behavior and have a significant focus on behavioral skills building exercises that emphasize problem solving, communication between partners, sexual negotiation and abstinence. However, teachers and practitioners often find it challenging to implement these programs as they require use of interactive activities such as role- plays and group discussions that require more student participation in the classroom than conventional lectures, something that many educators are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with. Teachers often resort to either redesigning these interactive activities within the lessons, or completely eliminating them. The proposed project, entitled the Abstinence and Contraception Education Storehouse (ACES), proposes to develop a library of educational resources that can be used to supplement and enhance skill-building activities in teen sexual risk reduction interventions. The ACES educational resource has a two-fold aim: (a) to train teachers and practitioners to implement interactive skill-building program components by offering demonstrations/training in interactive teaching, and (b) to offer teachers/practitioners a variety of interactive skill-building activities and exercises from effective teen pregnancy/STI/HIV prevention programs that can supplement and enhance their own curriculum or intervention. ACES will have two product components corresponding to these aims: (1) The ACES Teacher Training Library that contains video clips offering guidance on conducting interactive teaching sessions and facilitating group participation, and (2) the ACES Youth Activities Library that contains a series of video vignettes and clips that will demonstrate a variety of role play scenarios and group discussions organized around key topic areas in the area of teen pregnancy/STI/HIV prevention. The role-play and group discussion video vignettes in the ACES Youth Activities library will be drawn from Sociometrics' Program Archive for Sexuality, Health and Adolescence (PASHA), a collection of replication kits for 34 teen pregnancy and STI/HIV prevention programs selected as effective by a Scientist Expert Panel in preventing teen pregnancy/STI/HIV or their risky sexual behavior antecedents. Development of ACES will be informed by usability testing with representatives of the product's adult (teacher, health practitioner) and youth target audiences. A two-part field test will examine ACES' potential outcomes for enhancing providers' motivation, skill, and confidence in implementing sexual health interventions as well as youths' knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intentions regarding safe sex, and youths' satisfaction with the prevention program. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE The ACES product will promote public health education in several ways. It will: (1) offer teachers/practitioners a variety of interactive skill-building activities and exercises that can supplement and enhance program content and activities in the intervention being implemented by them, (2) train teachers and practitioners to implement interactive skill-building program components by offering demonstrations/training in interactive teaching, and (3) increase student interest and engagement in prevention programs by incorporating such participatory activities. More highly skilled health educators and stronger, more efficacious, and more cost-effectively- produced youth-focused prevention programs should be the result.