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This paper discusses 2 problems associated with evaluation of school health education programs: 1) why evaluate at all; and 2) what criteria, assuming a need to evaluate the programs, are most appropriate for assessing program effectiveness? The need for evaluation arises from public interest in and concern for health promotion and prevention. Given the need to educate the population for purposes of prevention, the specific immediate function of school health education must be clarified so that programs are not judged on outcome criteria that are inappropriate or unrealistic. To this end, school health educators are encouraged to view their teaching tasks in the proper perspective, one of the potentially valuable factors for improving the quality of life of the population served. School programs should especially apply themselves to evaluative research activities addressed to behavioral and health effects to demonstrate the relationships between health education in the school and the benefits the student will accrue over time. In essence, then, school programs should focus on modifying behaviors which will be used to prevent disease or ill health prior to the signs or symptoms of illness. It is emphasized that attempts to establish immediate behavior change as goals of school programs would be naive. Federal and state initiatives are needed to support the necessary cost-benefit studies and the long-term evaluations required for policy decisions concerning school health education programs. Local support is adequate to perform short-term studies of impact on knowledge and skills of specific health education programs.
Kreuter et al. (Sat,) studied this question.