Promoting Health Among Teens! (Comprehensive)
In the Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive curriculum, students learn about puberty, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, and pregnancy prevention through a lively, interactive and student-centric curriculum, that includes talking circles, brainstorming, roleplays, DVDs, exercises and games that make learning enjoyable.
| Category | Program Features |
|---|---|
| Setting | School / Community based |
|
Program Length |
12 hours/year | 1 year 12 sessions total |
| Age Group | Ages 12–14 (Middle School) |
| Look Inside |
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Overview | Description | Population | Authors
Overview
In the Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive curriculum, students learn about puberty, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, and pregnancy prevention through a lively, interactive and student-centric curriculum, that includes talking circles, brainstorming, roleplays, DVDs, exercises and games that make learning enjoyable. This curriculum includes information about condom use as well as abstinence.
Description
The Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive program consists of twelve 1-hour modules that teach youth about puberty, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, and pregnancy prevention. The information is serious and important, but presented in a way that students can learn together and enjoy themselves. Most activities are brief and can be completed in 10 to 15 minutes. Study participants stated that they had a good time, learned a lot and would recommend the program to their friends.
Learning activities include small-group discussions, videos, games, role-plays and homework assignments. Activities are designed to help teens get the skills they need to negotiate and practice abstinence and correct condom use if sexually active. These activities make teens aware of how choices about their sexual behavior can affect their health.
After participating in the curriculum, students will have:
- Increased knowledge about prevention of HIV, STDs, and pregnancy.
- More positive attitudes/beliefs about abstinence and condom use.
- Increased confidence in their ability to negotiate abstinence.
- Increased confidence in their ability to negotiate safer sex and to use condoms correctly.
- Increased negotiation skills.
- Improved condom-use skills.
- Stronger intentions to abstain from sex, or use condoms if they have sex.
- A lower incidence of HIV/STD risk-associated sexual behavior.
- A stronger sense of pride and responsibility in making a difference in their lives.
The curriculum modules include:
- Module 1: Getting to Know You and Steps to Making Your Dreams Come True
- Module 2: Puberty and Adolescent Sexuality
- Module 3: The Consequences of Sex: HIV Infection
- Module 4: A Plan to Reduce the Consequences of Sex
- Module 5: The Consequences of Sex: STD Infection
- Module 6: The Consequences of Sex: Pregnancy
- Module 7: STD/HIV Vulnerability
- Module 8: Risky Sexual Behavior and Content Review
- Module 9: Sexual Responsibility: Abstinence Skills
- Module 10: Sexual Responsibility: Condom Use Skills
- Module 11: Enhancing Sexual Responsibility Skills
- Module 12: Role-Plays: Refusal and Negotiation Skills
Population Served & Setting
Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive was designed to be used with small groups of adolescents in an urban area but can be adapted to be used with larger numbers of participants in rural areas as well. The curriculum can be implemented in various community settings, including schools or youth-serving agencies.
About the Authors
Loretta Sweet Jemmott, PhD, RN, FAAN, is one of the nation’s foremost researchers in the field of HIV/AIDS, STD and pregnancy prevention, with a consistent track record of developing evidence-based sexual risk-reduction interventions. As an expert in health promotion research, she has led the nation in understanding the psychological determinants for reducing risk-related behaviors and how best to facilitate and promote positive changes in health behaviors. Her research is devoted to designing and evaluating theory-driven, culturally competent sexual risk-reduction behavioral interventions with various populations across the globe.
An outstanding translational researcher, Dr. Jemmott’s work has had global impact and changed public policy. She has partnered with community-based organizations, including churches, clinics, barbershops and schools, and transformed her NIH-funded evidence-based research outcomes for use in real-world settings. She has presented her research to the U.S. Congress and at the NIH Consensus Development Conference on Interventions to Reduce HIV Risk Behaviors. Dr. Jemmott has received numerous awards for her significant contributions to the field of HIV/STD and pregnancy prevention research, including the U.S. Congressional Merit Award, Sigma Theta Tau National Honor Society’s Episteme Award and Hall of Fame Award, and election to membership in the Institute of Medicine, an honor accorded to very few nurses.
John B. Jemmott III, PhD, received his PhD in psychology from the Department of Psychology and Social Relations at Harvard University. He holds joint faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania as the Kenneth B. Clark Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication, and as Professor of Communication in Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Center for Health Behavior and Communication Research at the Annenberg School for Communication.
Dr. Jemmott is a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association and the Society for Behavioral Medicine. He has published more than 100 articles and book chapters, and has received numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research designed to develop and test theory-based, contextually appropriate HIV/STD risk-reduction interventions for a variety of populations in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa.
Length | Elements | Staffing | Notification
Length of Program
The curriculum has 12 hours of content divided into twelve 1-hour modules.
Program Elements
Core intervention materials include:
- Facilitator Curriculum
- Activity Set (handouts, cards, posters)
- Curriculum DVDs
- Tanisha and Shay
- The Hard Way
- Nicole’s Choice
- The Subject Is: HIV (Safer Sex Version)
- The Subject Is: STDs (Safer Sex Version)
- The Subject Is: Puberty (Comprehensive Version)
- Wrap It Up & Condom Use Animation
- Sample Student Workbook
The Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive implementation set includes the facilitator's guide, activity set, a classroom set of 30 student workbooks and 7 DVDs. The curriculum requires the use of a monitor with DVD capabilities.
Student workbooks are recommended for every student. Additional workbook sets of 5 and 30 are available.
An optional LGBTQ Supplement is also available from ETR. It includes a lesson that can be taught before implementing the intervention as well as suggestions for acceptable adaptations to make evidence-based programs more inclusive of LGBTQ youth.
Staffing Requirements
This curriculum is designed to be taught by classroom teachers or family life educators. Educators interested in implementing this program should be skilled in using interactive teaching methods and guiding group discussions, and should be comfortable with the program content.
Parent/Guardian Notification
It is essential to inform parents and guardians regarding the nature and scheduling of this or any sexual health education program. Prior to implementation of the curriculum, families should receive written notice describing the goals of Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive and the nature of the content to be covered. Parents also should be given an opportunity to view the curriculum and related materials if they wish. The vast majority of parents want their children to receive appropriate instruction and be given the information and skills they need to protect their sexual health, but parents/guardians also must be allowed the chance to opt out or exclude their children from participating in the program, if they wish.
Logic Model | Evidence Summary | Reference
Logic Model
The program logic model can be found here:
Logic Model (pdf)
Evidence Summary
Research Design
In the original study, a randomized control trial was conducted to test the effects of the intervention. In the research study, African-American students in grades 6 and 7 were randomly assigned to an 8-hour abstinence-only intervention, an 8-hour safer-sex–only intervention, an 8- or 12-hour combined abstinence and safer-sex intervention, or an 8-hour health-promotion control group. The programs were facilitated by minority facilitators—one was Puerto Rican and all others were African American.
Findings
The participants who participated in the Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensiveintervention reported:
- A reduction in the incidence of multiple sexual partners compared with the health control group.
- A significant reduction in the incidence of recent sexual intercourse at the 24-month follow-up.
The Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive intervention was especially effective with sexually experienced adolescents. For example, among participants who were sexually experienced at baseline, those in the 12-hour combined abstinence and safer-sex intervention reported less sexual intercourse in the previous 3 months at the 6-, 12-, 18- and 24-month follow-up than the control group. In addition, they reported less unprotected sex at all five follow-up sessions than the control group.
The adolescents who received the Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive intervention also scored higher in condom use knowledge; believed more strongly that condoms can prevent pregnancy, STDs and HIV; believed more strongly that using condoms will not interfere with sexual enjoyment; expressed greater confidence that they could have condoms available when they needed them; and reported greater confidence that they could exercise sufficient impulse control to use condoms and greater self-efficacy for using condoms than did those in the control group.
Reference
General Adaptation Guidance | Fidelity Log | Pre/Post Tests | Policy
Adaptation Guidance
ETR is a leader in developing adaptation guidelines to enable professionals to adapt evidence-based intervention programs for implementation in underserved communities, while maintaining fidelity to the intervention's core components. ETR works with program developers to ensure that these tools are of the highest quality and meet the different needs of the field and end users, e.g., teachers, trainers, program mangers/staff, research teams, and funders.
See ETR’s General Adaptation Guidance
For answers to Frequently Asked Questions about program adaptations, please visit our Program Support Help Desk.
Read ETR's Adaptations Policy.
Fidelity Log
Click the link below for the log for Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive.
Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive Facilitator Log Sheets (pdf)
Pre/Post Tests
Classroom teachers can use pre/post tests to examine whether short-term knowledge learning objectives have been met. A simple pretest-posttest assessment design can be used to measure pre-instruction levels and post-instruction changes in student learning. The sample pre-test provided here is from the research study and gathers demographic data on participants in addition to assessing attitudes and sexual health knowledge.
Your ability to detect student change using this survey may vary and can be affected by numerous factors (e.g., number and content of lessons students receive, student scores at pretest, student motivation and interest in topic and survey, etc.) Improvement between pretest and posttest can be viewed as supportive, but not definitive, evidence of the curriculum's impact on short-term knowledge learning objectives. A well-designed evaluation study (e.g., using a strong experimental design with a well-matched comparison group and adequate sample size) with more extensive measurement would be needed to provide stronger evidence of curriculum impact.
Promoting Health Among Teens (Comprehensive) Pre- and Post-Questionnaire (pdf)
Promoting Health Among Teens (Comprehensive) Pre- and Post-Questionnaire Key (for Section E) (pdf)
Learn more about how ETR can help with your evaluation needs >>
Training & TA
For over 30 years, ETR has been building the capacity of community-based organizations, schools, school districts, and state, county and local agencies in all 50 states and 7 U.S. territories to implement and replicate evidenced-based programs (EBPs) to prevent teen pregnancy, STD/STI and HIV. Our nationally recognized training and research teams work in partnership with clients to customize training and technical assistance (TA) to address the needs of their agencies and funding requirements.
Please note: At this time we are not offering a Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive-specific virtual training. Instead, the purchase of this program comes with one seat to a Making Proud Choices! training, which shares many of the same activities, goals, and objectives.
ETR’s Virtual Training of Educators (TOE) equips sexual health facilitators with the knowledge and skills necessary to implement the program with youth.
All trainings align with ETR’s distributive learning process, an interactive experience that takes place over time. Core to this research-based approach is the acquisition of knowledge and development of skills, followed by the implementation of the program and educator self-reflection. During this process, ETR trainers engage learners through teaching strategies, interactive activities, modeling and follow-up support.
Training Components
All of the following components are critical for skill development and implementation success. Make sure you can commit about 10 hours of total time to the training experience for program excellence!
- Priming Activities: Learn more about the theories that ground the curriculum and the research that highlights the program’s impact on the sexual health behaviors of youth. These activities, completed prior to Live Session 1, will help to get you acquainted with your program.
- Live Sessions: Most of the learning happens live. Over the course of three 2.5 hour sessions spread out over three weeks, our experienced trainers will take you through the curriculum and help develop skills necessary to deliver Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive. The trainer will model best practices for implementation, build comfort with the subject matter, and tackle a variety of implementation challenges and strategies.
- Intersession Activities: Between each live session, guided intersession activities will help participants to keep thinking about their evidence-based program and it’s implementation to continue the learning.
- Practice Session: After the live sessions are over, it’s time to see what you know! A practice session, or teach-back, will be assigned to each participant and various opportunities for feedback will be provided.
- Follow-up Support: The training is only the beginning. We offer follow-up support for the first three months after training, including additional resources and check-ins via email.
Training Goal
Educators will have the knowledge, skills and confidence to effectively implement the program with youth.