Evaluation of the farm to you nitrition education interactive exhibit

Abstract

The objective of this study was to evaluate the Farm to You exhibit, and determine if participation in the educational intervention enhanced behavior change in fourth and fifth grade students beyond that seen after students participated in the Healthy Oklahoma Youth (HOY) nutrition education program. The information learned from the evaluation will help guide future development of similar interventions in Oklahoma and contribute to the existing body of literature related to the efficacy of Social Cognitive Theory based interventions in school and community settings. The evaluation utilized repeated measures, case-control design to measure changes in frequency of food and physical activity behaviors. A repeated measure t-test was used to evaluate differences in pre and post questionnaire items among the control and intervention group. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to identify significant differences in the amount of behavior change between students who experienced the Farm to You exhibit and those that did not. The paired samples t-test was used to determine significant changes in behavior within the control group in four of the ten items on the questionnaire. Within the intervention group, the paired samples t-test revealed six behaviors in which means significantly raised from pre to post intervention. The frequencies analysis identified a greater percent of students in the intervention group reporting increased frequency for performing the evaluated behaviors when compared to the control group for seven of the ten questionnaire items. Thus, the Farm to You exhibit in combination with the HOY lesson series, enhanced nutrition behavior change in fourth and fifth grade students beyond that achieved by students exposed only to the nutrition lesson series.