Effect of School-Based Nutrition Education on Adolescents' Knowledge of Nutrition, Eating Disorders and Dietary Practices in Obio/Akpor, Rivers State.

Author

Chuku Francisca , Prof. Olufemi Gbenga Omitola


Abstract

 The study investigated the effect of school-based nutrition education intervention on the knowledge of good nutrition and eating disorders and on the dietary practices of adolescents in secondary schools in Obio/Akpor Local Government Area of Rivers State, Nigeria. The study adopted a two-group non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with a three-month follow-up. The population of the study consisted of 5,264 students enrolled in four secondary schools, from which 310 adolescents aged 10 to 19 years were drawn using a multistage sampling technique, with 155 in each of the intervention and control groups, and 299 completed the post-intervention assessment. Data were collected with the Nutrition Education and Eating Disorder Questionnaire (NEEDQ), whose knowledge sections yielded Kuder-Richardson 20 coefficients of 0.87 and 0.81, while the dietary-practice section yielded a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.84. The intervention group received 12 weekly nutrition education sessions, whereas the control group continued with normal school activities. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation, whereas the hypotheses were tested using Welch's independent-samples t-test and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) at the 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed that combined knowledge of good nutrition and eating disorders increased by 7.82 points in the intervention group compared with 1.32 points in the control group (p < .001; d = 1.96). The findings also showed that healthy dietary-practice scores increased by 8.83 points in the intervention group compared with 0.86 point in the control group, and that the difference remained significant after baseline scores were controlled (p < .001; partial η² = .690). One of the recommendations was that the Rivers State Ministry of Education should integrate structured nutrition and eating-disorder education into secondary-school health education programmes and sustain its implementation across schools.



Keywords

Nutrition Education, Knowledge of Good Nutrition, Eating Disorders, Dietary Practices, Adolescents, Rivers State.



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References


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