Effect of interactive school health programme on knowledge of smoking prevention among primary school children / Roswati Nordin

Decades ago, the school atmosphere has been a focal point of hard work to influence adolescents on the consequences of smoking behavior and other negative behaviors. Therefore, the findings recommended for more inclusive tobacco policies, activities prevention programme and related matters to reduce the morbidity and mortality related to smoking behavior. The aims for this intervention study focused one valuating of the effectiveness of the interactive programme on prevention of smoking among school children. This study used quasi experimental design involving two groups of participants. The children for Intervention group (n=60) was given an interactive programme for 9 hours within 3 days and the control group (n=60) was given the pamphlet as usual. Data collected before the intervention programme and after two weeks post intervention using validated questionnaire. The results for general knowledge on cigarette after the intervention indicated that there was a significant changes with mean scores of general knowledge increased from preintervention(M= 11.97, SD = 3.12) to two weeks after intervention (M= 12.77, SD =3.30) and (p - value = 0.01 < 0.05). For knowledge on dangers of smoking the results showed the median score before intervention (16.03) is higher than after the intervention programme (12.00) and the different was not significant on the knowledge of dangers of smoking (p - value = 0.27 > 0.05).For the effect of the interactive programme towards the knowledge on bans of smoking the scores of statistics test in post-intervention are lower (M = 21.72, SD = 2.48) than preintervention(M= 22.33, SD = 2.15). This difference was not significant p - value 0.10> 0.05. In conclusion, the beneficial effect of the interactive programme was found even though the effect was small. However, the interactive programme can be introduced as an alternative teaching method in prevent the school children on smoking.