A comparative study of two instructional methods employed in teaching nutrition among culturally diverse adolescents : teacher-oriented lecture and student-oriented instructional design

Graduation date: 1986The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the effectiveness\ud of two approaches in nutrition education instruction among culturally\ud diverse adolescents: the teacher-oriented lecture approach and the\ud student-oriented instructional design approach. The study was\ud designed to help culturally diverse students gain a basic\ud understanding of practices that promote health and sound nutritional\ud practices. The population consisted of junior and senior high-school\ud students enrolled in a vocational technical institute in Florida.\ud Each instructional approach consisted of two 1-1/2 hour presentations\ud on nutritional concerns of adolescents. The teacher-oriented lecture\ud presentation was organized around concepts taken from Ausubel (1968).\ud It was designed to meet the academic and cultural needs of students by\ud the lecture approach. The student-oriented instructional design\ud workshop was organized around concepts taken from Gagne (1974). It\ud was designed to meet the academic and cultural needs of students by an\ud instructional design approach. The study was organized as a\ud pretest-posttest and experimental control group design. A nutrition\ud knowledge questionnaire served as both the pretest and posttest. The\ud four hypotheses were stated in the null and were treated by utilizing\ud multiple regression analysis. The .05 level of significance was\ud selected as the acceptable level of statistical significance. The\ud study examined possible relationships between the posttest scores and\ud the independent variables: pretest, group, gender, race, and\ud occupation of the head of household. The results relative to the four\ud hypotheses revealed that there was no significant difference in the\ud adjusted mean knowledge scores of the nutrition questionnaire\ud according to group, gender, race, or occupation of head of household.\ud It was concluded that when the teacher-oriented lecture approach or\ud the student-oriented instructional design approach of instruction is\ud designed according to teaching factors conducive to learning for\ud culturally diverse adolescents, both methods are equally effective