Exercise Your Options
Helping Middle School Students Make Healthier Food Choices With Nutrition Education
Overview
The middle school environment is rapidly changing and presents a growing opportunity to implement an enhanced, technology-integrated nutrition and physical-activity education curriculum. Dairy Council of California introduced in fall 2005 its fifth-generation curriculum for middle schools, Exercise Your Options. The goal was to create nutrition education lessons that began with a focus on the uniqueness of each student, as opposed to one that began with nutrition information, which most adolescents quickly judge as irrelevant. Health and Physical Education Frameworks, the 2005 Dietary Guidelines, USDA’s MyPyramid, as well as extensive interviews with students, teachers, curriculum specialists and adolescent medicine and behavioral experts guided program development. The blueprint of Exercise Your Options underwent several stages of developmental testing in classrooms throughout California. The program was then revised based on teacher implementation feedback and initial student behavior changes.
Evaluation
Dairy Council of California programs focus on increasing students’ knowledge and awareness, and allowing them to put this into practice. Researchers from University of California, Davis devised a behavior change study of over 3,300 middle school students participating in Exercise Your Options fourth edition. Compared to the control group, three-day food logs completed by intervention students demonstrated significant positive changes. The changes in student consumption patterns were an increased consumption of naturally nutrient-rich foods and decrease in high-calorie "extras." For more on these evaluation results, click here. An evaluation on the current version of Exercise Your Options was conducted in 2007 with 566 students in 16 classrooms. Findings from the formative evaluation suggest that it is a well-liked, strong program. Data indicated that the program changes students’ lives by making them more aware of their bodies’ nutrition and physical-activity needs. Data also indicated that students were eating more breakfast, eating more Milk & Milk Products, foods from the Meat, Beans & Nuts group, and Grains group while eating fewer extras and discretionary calories, when comparing the pre- to the post-surveys. Survey findings also show that physical activity increased whereas TV/DVD viewing and video/computer-game playing decreased.
Teacher Comments on Nutrition Lessons
- "The video automatically ties the students in. And it’s an effective way to get across complex concepts, because it can be more concise than we can be, because the video is edited and polished."
- "From a teacher’s perspective, the alignment with the standards of education results in situations where the teachers have little additional points to cover to meet their requirements. "I didn’t have to add anything to teach the lessons," succinctly covers many teachers’ perspectives."
- "We just had the California State writing test, and (prior) I asked the students what they needed to get ready. One student said they needed to eat breakfast, and explained why. They remembered the EYO breakfast lesson!"
For a complete report on the evaluation of Exercise Your Options with middle school California students, read the results here.
View Exercise Your Options middle school program materials, including all eight video segments