Tag: health

Impact of hygiene interventions on student outcomes

By Nathan Storey, Center for Research and Reform in Education, Johns Hopkins University

Chronic infections and illnesses affect more than just children’s health; they also have serious negative effects on school attendance, achievement, and engagement. Efforts to support and improve student health practices through school-based hygiene interventions may serve to improve not just health practices, but also academic outcomes. In a recent systematic review, Ismail and colleagues examined 23 randomized and non-randomized studies conducted across Africa, Asia, the United States, Spain, Denmark, and China. These studies assessed the impact of school-based health interventions on student outcomes, comparing them to standard curricula and practices.

The review focused on hand-body hygiene (including handwashing), genital hygiene, oral hygiene, and dental hygiene interventions. Hand hygiene interventions typically emphasized washing hands after using the toilet and before meals. Beyond improving student knowledge, attitudes, and hygiene practices, hand-body and genital hygiene interventions also led to statistically significant reductions in infection-related absenteeism.

Although the researchers suggest more evidence would improve their confidence, these findings are encouraging in affirming how positive health practices can improve health-related absences. Student attendance has, after all, been shown to have a vital influence on engagement and achievement.

School gardens and nutrition education in limited-income Alabama

By Nathan Storey, Center for Research and Reform in Education, Johns Hopkins University

As funding cuts loom over the education system, from the federal level down to local classrooms, it is useful to remember the impact education and schools can have on all aspects of students’ lives. In addition to math and reading, schools have the capacity to change students’ health behaviors and their nutrition practices. A recent study in Alabama, conducted by Sofia Sanchez and colleagues, examined the impact of school gardens and nutrition education on students’ fruit and vegetable consumption. Other studies have highlighted the positive benefits that healthy diets have on academic achievement and social and emotional well-being. However, as Sanchez and her team noted, disparities in diet and nutrition knowledge persist along race and economic lines in Alabama and beyond.

In their study, the researchers conducted a randomized trial of over 4,000 third-grade students from 99 Alabama schools, some with on-site school gardens and others without. After surveying students on their nutrition, treatment students participated in the Body Quest school-based health promotion curriculum, which focused on healthy foods, beverages, and physical activity. Researchers were particularly interested in whether the presence of gardens and BQ provided an additive impact.

Before the intervention, students at schools with gardens already reported higher fruit and vegetable consumption. Using multi-level modeling, the researchers found that BQ nutrition education increased third grade students’ fruit and vegetable intake. Surprisingly, students who participated in BQ but did not have access to a school garden demonstrated the greatest vegetable consumption increases. While not feasible for all schools to maintain gardens, the study suggest that both school and community gardens, along with nutrition education alone, can positively influence student dietary practices.

Student Success Skills’ effects on Hispanic students

By Susan Davis, Johns Hopkins University

Student Success Skills (SSS) is a program designed to help students reflect and develop purposeful academic, social, and self-management skills that ultimately lead to improved performance in school. A guidance counselor delivers weekly classroom lessons in academic goal-setting and in non-academic areas such as tracking health, wellness, and anxiety, which when addressed, have been shown in research to positively affect academic achievement.

Because the Hispanic student population is the fastest-growing of all student subsets, to ensure adequate cultural responsiveness, researchers examined the impact of SSS on attendance, self-regulation, and test anxiety on the subset of 681 Hispanic fifth grade students within a 2019 randomized controlled trial of SSS (383E, 298 C) from 30 schools in a single district. Following a one-day training, school counselors in the experimental group were randomly assigned to deliver SSS weekly for 45 minutes over five weeks, with a monthly booster session January-March. Control counselors continued with regular counseling practices. . All students were tested two weeks before the experimental group began receiving treatment, two weeks after the fifth lesson and thirty weeks after the fifth lesson. Students were evaluated using three years’ attendance data and two student surveys: the Student Engagement in School Success Skills (SESSS) Self-Regulation of Arousal subscale and the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) test anxiety subscale.

Results showed that at 30 weeks post intervention, students who had been in the SSS group had better attendance and less test anxiety than controls. These improvements were not evident in at the first post-test, but were evident at the second, implying that time is needed both for students to create better habits and for schools to nurture the environments needed to encourage attendance and promote a safe environment. These findings mirror the findings of the overall RCT from which this data was drawn. Self-regulation showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups at either pre- or post-test—while experimental students’ self-regulation scores were indeed higher than controls’, the difference was not statistically significant.

Effects of later school start times on teachers

By Susan Davis, Johns Hopkins University

Considerable research has explored the impact of delayed school start times on students’ academic achievement and well-being. However, a recent study in The Journal of School Health goes beyond and investigates the effects of later school start times specifically on teachers’ health and daytime functioning.

The study took place in the Cherry Creek School District in Denver, Colorado, where new start times were implemented in the 2017-18 school year, and whose effects were documented in the Changing Start Times: Longitudinal Effects (CaSTLES) study. High schools started 70 minutes later (at 8:20), grades 6-8 started 40-60 minutes later (at 8:50), and elementary schools started 60 minutes earlier (at 8:00). Subjects were K-12 teachers teaching in each of the three study years, and who were surveyed on aspects of their sleep and performance at three points in the study: four months before the time change, and then six and eighteen months after the time change. An average of 1784 teachers responded each year, for an average 49.9% participation rate.

Results showed that high school teachers reported better sleep quality (a 65% increase at post-change) and increased alertness (a 51% increase at post-change), with no significant changes in either reported for elementary teachers.

Overall, the later start times for secondary schools and earlier start time for elementary schools yielded 85-90% of teachers reporting that they got enough sleep; the authors contrasted this with 64-74% of adults in Colorado reporting the same.