A cluster randomized trial of a sex education programme in Belize, Central America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Concerns about adverse consequences of early childbearing and risk of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) have renewed interest in the sexual behaviour of adolescents in developing countries, where they represent a large proportion of the population and are at highest risk. To date, little is known about the sexual knowledge of adolescents in developing countries. This study's primary objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of a responsible sexuality education programme (RSP) in changing knowledge associated with sex and sexuality; secondary objectives were to evaluate changes in attitudes and behavioural intent. METHODS: A cluster randomized design randomizing high school classes in Belize City. Subjects were 13-19 years old. RESULTS: Seven schools in Belize City were selected; 8 classrooms were randomized to the intervention arm and 11 classrooms to the control arm (N = 399). The intervention was associated with two more correct answers on the post-test (difference score was 2.22 points, 95% CI = 0.53, 3.91) after adjusting for gender and previous sexual experience. After controlling for gender and previous sexual experience, the intervention was associated with no change in the attitudes (0.06, 95% CI: -2.89, 2.82) or behavioural intent domains (0.84, 95% CI: -1.12, 2.46). CONCLUSIONS: Greater changes in knowledge were observed in the intervention group than in the control group following the intervention. Changes were not observed for the attitude or behavioural intent domains. These results and the results of similar studies may be used to further improve sex education programmes as it is imperative that students have access to the information necessary to make informed decisions regarding their sexual health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".