St. Jude Cancer Education for Children Program: Evaluation at 4th-Grade Level

Trial Information

St. Jude Cancer Education for Children Program: Evaluation at 4th-Grade Level

The subjects in this research study will be current 4th-grade students at elementary schools
in Memphis, Tennessee who choose to participate in the Program. These participants are not
patients of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The Program will be implemented over a
three-day period. Each student will attend two presentations and six hands-on activities led
by St. Jude faculty and research staff on topics within their expertise, such as cells and
cancer, and healthy living. Printed materials to be distributed as part of the St. Jude
Cancer Education for Children Program have been developed by a multi-disciplinary team of
St. Jude employees and local educators and reviewed by national experts for scientific
accuracy and appropriate readability. Material includes three illustrated children's books,
a laboratory manual, and activity sheets.

One pre- and two post-tests will be administered by designated school teachers. The tests
consist of 10 multiple-choice questions per each of three modules(cells, cancer, and healthy
living), validated by a group of experts for readability and content relevance. Knowledge
acquisition will be assessed by taking the differences from first post-test to pre-test
scores, obtained from 10 questions on each component of the intervention, and using
one-sample signed rank test to evaluate the improvement in the knowledge scores. A similar
analysis will be undertaken by taking the differences from the 2nd post-evaluation to the
1st post-evaluation for each participant to assess knowledge retention.