Evaluation of food and nutrition education in schools that incorporates the health education and promotion evaluation method

Abstract

Objective: After introducing a nutrition teacher and other systems in schools, the food and nutrition education program has been well implemented there, but its evaluation method remains inadequate. To improve the evaluation, the Nutrition Education Committee of the Japanese Society of Health Education and Promotion (hereinafter the Committee) has published "Food and Nutrition Education Evaluation in School – A Practical Workbook." In this symposium, we reported what we have achieved so far to use the workbook more effectively.

Contents: The Committee presented a model to make a habit of healthy eating among children using the Precede-Proceed model. To use this model for evaluation, we need to know the status quo first. In the Fiscal Year 2017, we therefore identified key items for evaluation by using data from nationwide surveys targeting school children. By utilizing these selected items for systematic evaluation, each school and the local government can objectively evaluate the effect of its food and nutrition education program.

Conclusion: We successfully created a framework for evaluating the food and nutrition education program in schools and identified key items for evaluation. In the future, we will collect the evaluation result reports and share them with relevant people across the country. Moreover, we would like to conduct activities leading to advocacy by showing the evaluation results in a visible manner to those concerned with such evaluation.