| Project: Methodology to Evaluate Effects of Team Nutrition Program in Schools |
| Award Year: 2003 |
| Amount of award, fiscal 2003: $25,000.00 |
| Institution: Louisiana Tech University |
| Principal Investigator: Mary Murimi |
| Status: Completed |
| Detailed Objective: USDA created the Team Nutrition Program to improve children's eating and physical activity habits through nutrition education. The program includes an emphasis on improvement of school meals and promotion of a healthy school environment. Team Nutrition is a voluntary program; schools may or may not elect to become "Team Nutrition schools" and participating schools may choose the type of Team Nutrition activities they implement.
To be able to assess the extent to which the Team Nutrition Program is achieving its intended goals, it is necessary to develop methods to characterize the degree to which the program is being implemented in a given sample of schools. This project will develop a methodology to assess level of implementation of the Team Nutrition Program. Specific objectives are to: 1) identify, in consultation with Team Nutrition experts, the types of information that should be collected to assess implementation of Team Nutrition in individual schools and the appropriate informants from whom that information should be collected; 2) develop and pretest question items that measure the types of information identified by experts, and 3) examine the feasibility of collecting responses to these questions via a web-based survey. |
| Topic: Child Nutrition, Data Collection and Methodology, Nutrition Education, School Lunch and Breakfast |
Output:
Murimi, M., A. Sample, J. Guthrie, and D. Landry. “Nutrition Education in Team Nutrition Middle Schools: Teachers’ Perceptions of Important Topics to Be Taught and Teaching Curriculum Used,” Journal of Child Nutrition and Management, Vol. 31, Issue 2, Fall 2007.
Murimi, M., J. Colvin, K. Liner, and J. Guin. Methodology To Evaluate the Outcomes of the Team Nutrition Initiative in Schools, Contractor and Cooperator Report No. 20, June 2006.
Murimi, M., J. Guthrie, D. Landry, and M. Paun. “Assessing Nutrition Knowledge and Dietary Habits of Adolescents Using Personal Data Assistants,” Journal of Child Nutrition and Management, Vol. 32, Issue 2, Fall 2008. |