A Game-based Nutrition Education: Teaching Healthy Eating to Primary School Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine eating habits of school age children and to evaluate the effect of nutrition education via games on promoting healthy eating habits. Materials and Methods: The study, which is quasi-experimental with a pre-test/post-test experimental model without a control group, was conducted at a primary school. The population of the study includes 8-year-old 2 nd-grade students. The population consists of 59 primary school students who participated in all nutrition education and completed one pre-test and two post-tests. The data were analyzed via descriptive statistics, Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney-test, McNemar's test, Shapiro-Wilk tests. Results: According to the findings, 59.3% of the students didn't have any nutrition education and 84.7% of them considered their eating habits as good. It was also found that 50.8% of the students before the training, 30.5% of them right after the training and 40.7% of them 3 months after the training stated they skipped one of their meals and that lunch which was the most frequently skipped meal. Although there was no change in consumption of fresh fruit and fruit juice, there was an increase in the consumption of fresh vegetable and vegetable meals, but this was not transformed into behavior. The consumption of dairy products increased and transformed into behavior. The average nutrition knowledge of the students increased both right after the training and 3 months later. Conclusion: It is thought that the nutrition education given to the school age children had a positive effect on their nutrition knowledge, attitudes, behaviors.

Can Nutrition Education in Primary Schools be an Efficient Way to Prevent Obesity in Adult Life? A Review of the Literature

“…According to Contento and colleagues, measurement tools must be tightly linked to the purpose of the intervention to be consid- during the program [13,18,20,22,23,26,36,45] or literature model adapted to relate to construct of interest [11,13,17,19].…”

“…Time of intervention vary among different studies. Finding suggest that from short (12 weeks or less) [13,[17][18][19][20] to intermediate (4-12 months) [11,[21][22][23][24] and long (more than one year) [25,26] interventions have the ability to significantly enhance children's knowledge.…”

“…Another strategy used is the game-based nutrition education instead of narration methods, to increase children's understanding [20], helping them to acquire healthy nutrition behaviors [18].…”

“…Most authors agree that parental involvement can increase children's nutritional behavior, more than children's knowledge [17,18,21,25,26] There are different ways to involve parents, such as newsletters for parents, homework to do with children, parental evenings and involving them in the maintenance of the garden during the school year or during holidays [17,39], cooking lessons or shows [19,21].…”

“…a researcher who has a background in food science to ensure a high level of teaching[11,[18][19][20][21][22]24,26,36].The educational interventions on PA were developed by different figure depending on the type of program. Often teachers or school staff were the key driver of physical and health behaviors.Hills., et al reported that physical educators should encourage the entire school staff to be more physically active in order to educate…”