Date of Graduation

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

Committee Chair

Erron Huey

Abstract

This study examines participants’ change in knowledge before and after attending a childhood obesity training event. A pre-post assessment scale was used to measure and compare knowledge scores among participants of both two and three-day events. The questionnaire included seven subscales of content delivered during the training sessions. These included: training goals and movement guidelines, general obesity knowledge, general movement knowledge, assessing and evaluating children’s motor skills, and three subscales specifically on the movement workshops in the training. This study consisted of 78 personnel working for the Office of Head Start or Women, Infants and Children (WIC) enrolled in one of three recent obesity prevention trainings Mean scores increased by 5 points when comparing the pretest (i.e., Total Score M = 16.263) to the posttest (i.e., Total Score M = 21.287). ANOVAS failed to reveal patterns for each prepost score by training length or educational attainment. Next, a series of regression models verified the findings obtained from the ANOVA’s. The majority of models found significant differences (p < .01) for the averages of pretest and posttest scores with the exception of obesity. Overall, most models found no significant differences for the number of days participants attended training. This suggests that the two-day event may be as effective in delivering the information as the three-day event. However, one model did demonstrate a significant interaction effect (p < .013) for the number days and pretest/posttest scores in association with participant’s score related to movement vocabulary.

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