School Effectiveness Research for Improving Adolescent Health: Implications of a study on HIV education in Thailand

• In Event: Poster session III
  In Poster Session: Poster session 3

Proposal

Implementation of effective HIV/sexuality education which promotes student positive behavior is essential for improving adolescent health particularly in developing countries. For promoting behavior change, it is known that the programme should aim to increase not only student knowledge but also fostering non-cognitive skills, e.g. healthy attitude and life skills. Previous studies relevant to this topic exist both in Sexuality Education Research and School Effectiveness Research (SER). However, the findings of SER have not been used for developing a conceptual framework of factors that determine effectiveness of school-based CSE (i.e. Comprehensive Sexuality Education). Therefore, this research investigated in-school factors of effective CSE through a case study of selected schools by using a framework reflecting the findings from both of the literature.
The purpose of this study is to examine how factors of determining effective schools which were suggested by previous SER (e.g. Heneveld&Craig, 1996) affect the implementation of CSE programme in three effective schools in Thailand. Firstly, Thailand was selected because an international NGO has implemented a project of promoting school-based CSE. In this project, it was found that the student learning achievement in attitude development and behavior change varied between schools despite using the same CSE curriculum. Secondly, the schools are selected because of high achievement of non-cognitive learning outcomes from the CSE programme and located in rural communities. The data was mainly collected by semi-structured interviews to school principals, teachers and students. Questionnaire surveys with students were also conducted to check the validity of qualitative data. They quantitatively justified and supplemented the methods that I exploited originally in the paper. Qualitative data was analyzed by a modified grounded theory approach and the data analysis of quantitative data was descriptive statistics.
The result showed that some of the factors suggested by previous SER, i.e. positive teacher attitude and high expectation of students, are enabling factors of effective implementation of CSE programmes in these schools. These factors were also interlinked with the successful factors suggested by previous sexuality education studies, e.g. secured social environment and teacher trainings. However, other factors, i.e. order and discipline, and rewards and incentives, were not relevant factors of determining the effectiveness. This study implies that factors of determining effective schools pointed out by previous SER can be utilized for clarifying the characteristics and mechanism of effective implementation of CSE programmes at school.
In conclusion, this study fills the gap between SER and health education studies, which have been examined separately, by connecting their approaches in a newly constructed way. More specifically, the findings contribute to Sexuality Education Research through deepening the understanding of characteristics of effective CSE, and add important knowledge on SER in regards with the factors that determine effectiveness of non-cognitive skills development. This also means that there is a great possibility of using the knowledge of SER for the improvement of school-based health education and promote student behavior change.

Author

• Mina Chiba, Waseda University