Scheduled for Research Coordinating Board Oral Presentations I, Wednesday, April 2, 2003, 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM, Convention Center: 104AB


Critical to Your Health: Using the Theory of Planned Behavior to Teach Critical Thinking Skills and Their Effect on Health Behaviors

Julie Sammarco Henderson, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Chicago, IL

This study examined whether university students who were explicitly taught critical thinking skills using the Theory of Planned Behavior as part of a health education curriculum would demonstrate an increase in mastery over the content, health promoting lifestyle practices, and critical thinking skills compared to students who were not taught using this pedagogical strategy. Sixty-four students from two Healthy Lifestyle courses at a Doctoral Research Extensive university in the West participated in the study in fall 2001. Convenience sampling was utilized, and the nonequivalent control group design was applied. Students were pretested, posttested, and followup tested on healthy lifestyles content knowledge, health promoting lifestyle practices, and critical thinking skills using an instructor-generated healthy lifestyles content information (HLCI) test, the Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP-II), and the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) respectively. The treatment group was taught using The Blended Theory of Planned Behavior/Critical Thinking Infusion (TPB/CTI) Pedagogy Model. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies and percentages and inferential statistics such as t tests and chi-square tests were utilized to describe the data and test for statistical significance. An independent t test indicated that students taught using The Blended TPB/CTI Pedagogy Model had significantly higher change scores than the comparison group on the HLCI from pretest to followup test (p < .05). This study suggests that implementing The Blended TPB/CTI Pedagogy Model may be beneficial to increase students' content knowledge retention. Further research is needed to determine if these results are replicated with a larger sample size. Other recommendations include the development of an instrument to measure critical thinking as it applies to health behaviors and the inclusion of an increased longitudinal component.

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