IMPACT OF PROTON: A FOOD HANDLER CERTIFICATION COURSE ON FOOD HANDLERS' KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We conducted an evaluation of our food handler certification program, PROTON. Research examined changes in knowledge, attitude and behavior of participants as a result of completing the course. Participants completed a pre‐test assessing the three variables related to food safety at time of registration. One month following the completion of the program, participants completed an identical post‐test. A total of 1,042 pre‐tests and 320 post‐tests were completed. Scores in the pre‐test (6.3/10) and mean score for the post‐test (7.6/10) rendered a mean difference of 1.3 (95% confidence interval = 1.1 to 1.6; P < 0.0001) demonstrating an increase in knowledge by participants after taking the course. Significant increases for two attitudinal statements related to cross‐contamination and time‐temperature abuse scored high levels of participant agreement. PROTON is successful at positively impacting the knowledge, attitude and behavior of participants toward factors important to food safety, and recommendations for program enhancement are identified. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS From a program planning perspective, there are a number of implications from this study. It would be useful to revise the program according to the findings so that further positive changes in knowledge, attitude and behavior can be reached. For example, to enhance positive changes, certain parts of the workshop should have greater emphasis on improving skill building opportunities so that food handlers have the practical skills required to complete various safe food handling tasks when in their place of employment. It would also be important to ensure that the program content includes a variety of learning strategies, based on adult‐learning principles, to ensure the content is relevant and acceptable to all participants. Overall, PROTON is an effective food handler education and certification program, and enhancement to the program could increase further positive changes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".