Evaluation of a nutrition education program focusing on increasing fruit and vegetable intake: Knowledge tests for children in grades K--2

The prevalence of overweight children in the US is increasing, and has been positively associated with low fruit and vegetable consumption. Since school-based interventions have shown improvements in children's knowledge and behavior, a nutrition education program focusing on increasing children's fruit and vegetable intakes was implemented in a North Texas elementary school. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of nutrition education on children's knowledge. Trained graduate students delivered 12 lessons and administered tests before and after every three lessons to 317 children in grades K-2 in a North Texas elementary school. Paired t-tests showed that knowledge increase was significant on all tests for 1st grade children and on most tests for kindergarten and 2nd grade children. Independent t-tests revealed that non-bilingual classes scored higher than Spanish-bilingual classes on most tests. Repeated measures of ANOVA showed post-test scores were affected by pre-test scores, class-type, and grade; but not by the combined effect of grade and class-type.