SVOA DentistryPub Date : 2020-01-01Epub Date: 2020-08-18
R Constance Wiener, Kimberly Bailey, Amelia Adcock, Scott Young, Summer Kuhn, Catherine Morton
{"title":"Providing Oral Health Education to Adolescents with Peer-Assisted Learning.","authors":"R Constance Wiener, Kimberly Bailey, Amelia Adcock, Scott Young, Summer Kuhn, Catherine Morton","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is a need to increase oral health knowledge, attitudes and behaviors in children to improve oral health. This research involves peer-assisted learning to determine if high school students can influence rural middle school students' oral health. The study sample consisted of middle school students. After completing pre-test, they were assigned to receive 1) didactic peer-assisted learning with professionally supervised and educated high school students (members of an after-school pipeline program for science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health science); or, 2) teacher provided handouts/activity sheets. Both groups then completed a post test. The results of the Mann-Whitney U Tests showed that brushing and flossing failed to reach significant improvements between the pre-test and post-test for the handouts/activity sheets group (brushing, P=0.391; flossing, P=0.459). There was improvement within that group for oral health knowledge (P<.001). Brushing, flossing and oral health knowledge failed to reach significant improvement between the pre-test and post-test for the peer-assisted learning group (brushing, P=0.760; flossing, P=0.707; oral health knowledge, P= 0.154). In terms of oral health knowledge, there was no difference between the scores of the two groups on the pre-test (P-value = 0.980) nor on the post-test (P-value= 0.237). Near-peer assisted learning for oral hygiene knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors had similar outcomes as teacher provided handouts and activity sheets in a middle school setting.</p>","PeriodicalId":93501,"journal":{"name":"SVOA Dentistry","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8862479/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39645521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}