HOME ECONOMICS TEACHERS AS RESOURCE PERSONS FOR NUTRITION EDUCATION IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of a Nutrition Education Workshop on home economics teachers' nutrition knowledge and the number and type of their resource roles in elementary school nutrition education programs.;Three instruments were developed to gather data to test the hypotheses for this study. The Personal Data Sheet collected biographical and educational data about the teachers. Winand's Inventory of Nutrition Knowledge (WINK) was used in a pre-, post-, posttest design to measure nutrition knowledge. WINK was divided into 10 nutrition categories, with one category further divided into five subareas. The division of WINK into subparts was designed for identifying the subjects' weaker areas of nutrition knowledge. The Follow-up Survey elicited information on number and type of elementary-level resource roles completed and/or projectd by the teachers. The three instruments were administered to both groups.;Analysis of the data revealed that the experimental group of home economics teachers had a significant gain in nutrition knowledge when compared with the control group. However, attending a Nutrition Education Workshop did not motivate the experimental group to act as nutrition education resource persons with more significant frequency or in a significantly wider variety of roles than the control group.;The research study indicated that home economics teachers are acting as elementary-level nutrition resource persons to a limited degree whether or not they have recently taken a nutrition course. WINK scores showed that those teachers who had not taken a nutrition course for five or more years most needed to update their nutrition knowledge, particularly in the categories of nutrition education and nutrition in the life cycle. The study indicated that while many home economics teachers are motivated to update their nutrition knowledge, most are not motivated to use it in the elementary school.;Nineteen subjects in an experimental group attended a two-week Nutrition Education Workshop for three graduate semester credit hours. The 17 subjects in a control group did not attend the workshop.