New publication: Health education intervention for young children

Together with my colleagues Dr. Julie Parker, Dr. Heather Hanna, and Dr. Ginger Hooge, I am excited to announce the recent publication of “Evaluation of a Health Education Intervention for Rural Preschool and Kindergarten Children in the Southeastern United States: A Cluster Randomized Trial.” The full, open-access journal article is available here: https://www.jhseonline.com/article/view/931/882

This publication reports on the evaluation of a five-year project, funded by the National Institutes of Health. The project involved the development and testing of an integrated health education curriculum for young children, and a randomized trial showed that the program led to significant increases in children’s knowledge about nutrition, physical activity, and sleep.

Most importantly, the materials created through the project are freely available for public use. Materials include a curriculum for teachers and an activity book for families. We are tremendously grateful to the large, multidisciplinary team that developed them, and we hope that these will be useful to you and anyone who works with young children. Please share them!

Teacher curriculum: https://commlab.ssrc.msstate.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TeacherCurriculum_FINAL_June2016.pdf

Family activity book: https://commlab.ssrc.msstate.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/FamilyActivity_FINAL_July7.pdf