impact of curriculum design on health promoting behaviors at a community college in south Florida

The turn of the century has been greeted with major health care changes. Society is striving toward goals of health-promotion and wellness, historically nursing education's domain. To promote health in a population of community college students, this pilot study implemented health-promoting curriculum at a local community college. The theoretical framework for this research was Nola J. Pender's Health-Promotion Model. This framework was operationalized by Pender and Walker (1987) in an instrument, "Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II" (HPLP II). This instrument evaluates health-promoting behavior. The HPLP II was administered to: (a) An experimental group of 50 nursing students and 67 non-nursing students, and (b) a control group of 24 nursing and 31 non-nursing students for base-line measurement. The experimental group attended a health-promotion continuing education curriculum incorporating Pender and Walker's health-promotion subscales. After completion of the continuing education program, a post-test of the HPLP II was given. Without intervention, the control group completed the HPLP II for comparison. Descriptive statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to analyze the data. One hundred and seventy-two participants responded to the HPLP II pre-test. One hundred and sixty students responded to the post-test HPLP II, yielding a 93 percent overall response rate. It was found that: (1) Univariate ANOVA testing demonstrated significant differences among the characteristics of the sample by age, gender, ethnic background, and religion. (2) ANOVA testing demonstrated that there was a difference in health-promoting practices on the nutrition subscale by religion. (3) Health promoting deficiencies occurred on all subscales, with mean scores ranging from 2.14 to 3.09. (4) ANOVA testing demonstrated that there was a difference in groups (i.e. control and experimental across program areas) pre and post test on the interpersonal relation subscale between groups. Recommendations to the nursing field should be geared toward educating faculty on curriculum design of health promotion education. Uniform health promotion education materials should be created and utilized in the classroom setting. Future research in health promotion and health promotion education should include larger, more diverse samples from a variety of community colleges in order to strengthen the research findings. The time frame for the research conducted should also be lengthened to strengthen the research findings. Finally, the specific teaching methodology utilized in the health promotion education curriculum should be examined so that individual learning styles are acknowledged.