9.10: Health Education
Health education is more than just about providing facts to students regarding health behaviors. Increasing factual knowledge about health behaviors alone has not been shown to contribute to behavioral change. Instead, a comprehensive health education curriculum teaches students how to think about health promoting and health risk behaviors, the social and psychological factors that influence each of them, and then provides opportunities for students to practice and develop skills to navigate their own health decisions. In order to adopt healthy behaviors and avoid health-risk behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and norms around these behaviors must also be addressed. Students will also not adopt individual health behaviors if they lack self-efficacy (the belief that they can change a behavior). This type of health education requires adequate time for discussion and practicing skills, and needs to be repeated throughout the academic experience - it cannot be encapsulated in a single stand-alone lesson (CDC, 2019).
Currently, health education is not required or offered across all grade levels in highschools across the U.S. However, the research on innovative health education interventions demonstrates that well-planned, skills-based, and integrated lessons can improve knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions around healthy eating and physical activity. Examples studied included integrating health lessons into general curriculum (including physical activity breaks), hands-on learning experiences like taste-tests and cooking lessons, games, mindfulness activities, and farm-to-school units. Several interventions have also reported improvements in healthy eating patterns and physical activity among students. In adolescents, establishing these behaviors in high school can predict their continuance into adulthood (Lee et al., 2023). It is clear from the literature that comprehensive health education can be effective using a WSCC approach, particularly when it is also individualized for the needs and cultural context of the school community.