A Study to assess the effectiveness of Planned Teaching Program on knowledge regarding prevention of worm infestation among school children in selected school in Tumkur

Abstract

Background: Children are the future builders of every nation. Future of the nation depends upon the health of the children. Healthy children would turn up into healthy nation of tomorrow. Children’s health can be best examined in the light of the level of infant and child mortality prevailing in the society and also it is the most important index of socio-economic development. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over one billion of the world’s population is chronically infested with soil- transmitted helminthes and 200 million are infested with schistosomiasis. The high prevalence of these infestations is closely correlated to poverty, poor environmental hygiene and impoverished health services. Intestinal helminth infestations are the most common infestations among school age children, and they tend to occur in high intensity in this age group. Also, helminthic infestations lead to nutritional deficiency and impaired physical development, which will have negative consequences on cognitive function and learning ability. Young children have high infection rate and suffer with a heavy worm burden with different types of worm infestation. These parasitic infection manifested by reduced growth rates and children are not able to achieve their full potential in physical performance and education. Heavy hook worm burden is the major cause for iron deficiency anaemia. Objectives of The Study: To assess the existing knowledge among school students regarding prevention of worm infestation; To evaluate the effectiveness of the planned teaching programmed on worm infestation to the school students by posttest knowledge score and attitude score; To find out the associations between posttest knowledge and the selected demographic variables. Methodology: One group pretest and posttest research design was adopted, the 60 school children of 6th to 8th standard were selected by purposive sampling technique from selected schools of Tumkur. The planned teaching program was administered to the samples. The descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Results: The mean knowledge score is increased in the post test. The mean in the post test is 19.02 whereas the mean in the pre-test is 13.98. The variation is decreased in post-test when compared to pre-test. SD in the post-test is 2.016 and in the pre-test is 1.367. The mean improvement is 5.04. Though The study findings revealed that the post-test knowledge score was more than the pre-test knowledge score, it is essential to put it under statistical significance. So suitably the paired ‘t’-test was chosen and worked out. The calculated t-value is 21.56 which are highly significant. The result of association between knowledge of school children regarding prevention of worm infestation and selected demographic variables are, the chi- square test was resulted to be significant at p<0.05, so there is a statistical association between age, type of family, history of worm infestation in the family and source of information and pre- test knowledge scores. Conclusion: In the above findings of the present study, it is found that the Planned teaching programme is one the best methods which can be used to improve the knowledge of the school children regarding worm infestation.