HEALTH EDUCATION RESEARCH Theory and Practice

A preliminary study of assumptions underlying school health instruction D.K.Lohrmann and E.J.McClendon1 The purpose of this study was to examine some basic underlying assumptions of health instruc-tion to begin to determine if they are justifiably held. A number of assumptions related to student cognitive and affective skill development, students ' perceptions of teachers, characteristics of instruction and demographics were incor-porated as predictive variables in a structural model with student attitude and behavioral change as criteria. Student and teacher questionnaires were developed and administered to a sample of 588 students and 26 health teachers in the seven-county, southeastern Michigan area to gather data for testing the model. A series of multiple regres-sion analyses were performed and established that predictive variables were significantly (P < 0.01) related to student-perceived change. It was found that student-reported health behavior change was related to their development of higher level cognitive and affective functioning. Furthermore, both perceived skill development and perceived behavior change were dependent upon the students ' perception of the teacher — a compo-nent which is seldom included in underlying assumptions made about health instruction