How Prepared are Teachers to Provide Sexual Health Education?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Quality school-based sexual health education (SHE) requires that the curriculum is taught by knowledgeable, skilled, and comfortable educators. However, we know little about teachers’ preparedness to provide comprehensive SHE. We surveyed 412 current Canadian elementary (grade K to 5), middle (grades 6-8), and high school (grades 9-12) teachers to examine their attitudes toward, training for, and experience with providing SHE. Teachers reported very positive attitudes toward school-based SHE and most were in favor of introducing age-appropriate sexual health education in elementary school. Teachers reported little to no formal training to do so at either the pre-service and in-service level but had engaged in self-directed learning. A multiple regression analysis found that teachers with more experience providing SHE, more positive attitudes toward SHE, and more in-service training reported engaging in more self-directed learning. Teachers with more experience providing SHE, more positive attitudes toward SHE, more pre-service training, and more self-directed learning reported greater comfort providing SHE. Although these results support the many calls for better teacher training, they also suggest that efforts to improve the quality of SHE instruction might be better focused on enhancing access to quality materials for self-directed learning.
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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 | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.790 | 0.996 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".