Teaching Basic Life Support in Science Classrooms. How Do We Measure and Affect the Students’ Specific Self-Efficacy

Dumcke R, Wegner C, Rahe-Meyer N. Teaching Basic Life Support in Science Classrooms. How Do We Measure and Affect the Students’ Specific Self-Efficacy. Presented at the 3rd International Conference in Psychology, Education and Didactics (ICIPED 2021) , Bacău, Romania (as virtual conference).Considering first aid or basic life support (BLS), people report incertainty or limited knowledge as reasons. To achieve a higher engagement for intervening in cardiac arrest situations and improve survial outcomes, these issues were recommended to become part of health education curricula in secondary schools. Because self-efficay theory (SET) describes important predictors for a change in altruistic behaviour, this study presents a newly developed SET scale for the decision to initiate BLS in order to investigate self-efficacy and outcome expectancies as learning effects after a student BLS training. German secondary school students (N=365; Mage=13.67 years, SD=1.46) answered a SET-questionnaire before and after a BLS intervention. Six-point rating scales for self-efficacy and outcome expectancies with two sub-dimensions each were specifically developed and included specific challenges regarding BLS-efficacy. The scales’ structure was first confirmed by conducting a factor analysis (CFA). Secondly, the assessment-based outcome was calculated with t-tests for differences between the measurements as well as in age and gender. The CFA showed the best fit for a 4-factorial design (RMSEA=0.047; SRMR=0.051). Analysing SET-scales, self-efficacy values increased after the intervention for both, combined subscales and for the psychological and social barriers’ dimensions (pall<0.001). The perception of positive outcome expectancies increased significantly from baseline to final test, whereas negative ones decreased (p