Page 283 - Nutrition Counseling and Education Skills: A Guide for Professionals

mass index or weight, increases in the level of physical activity, decreased blood pressure, or reduction in risk
factors for disease and improved health (both long-term goals).

Care must be taken in interpreting some of these results, since they may reflect variables other than
education. Stress, for example, can affect a person’s blood sugar even when the diabetic diet is followed. In
nutrition education interventions, behavior has been measured in different ways ranging from observable food
choices to dietary intakes. These may include reports by teachers or parents of children’s food preferences,
such as refusing a food, willingness to taste a new food, and selecting a more nutritious food when other
choices were available. Actual food choices and consumption, plate waste, and self-reported intake can be used
to evaluate dietary intake. Other measures include 24-hour dietary recall, food records and food frequency
questionnaires, changing food preparation practices and recipes, or percentage of participation after an
intervention.

Physical measures can include laboratory values, blood pressure, weight indices, urinary output, and physical
activity status. Mean maternal weight gain, infant’s birth weight, and Apgar scores at birth can be used to
evaluate pregnancy outcomes and the health of newborn infants.24

Organizational changes include changes in school lunch menus, such as to lower fat and sodium, or food
choices and nutrition information offered at the worksite. Data can be collected on the number of work-
related injuries or food sanitation incidents after safety training.

Data Collection Techniques

There are many techniques for collecting evaluation data: paper-and-pencil tests, questionnaires, interviews,
visual observation, job sample or performance tests, simulation, rating forms or checklists, individual and
group performance measures, individual and group behavior measures, and self-reports. As measurement
devices that will be analyzed statistically, they require the use of specific experimental designs. Regardless of
the particular instrument or technique used, it should be pretested with a smaller group before actual use.
Since comparisons are desired, it is usually necessary to collect preliminary data on current performance or
behaviors.21

Tests

Tests, especially written tests, are probably the most common devices for measuring learning. Tests sample
what one knows, and schools depend heavily on them. Multiple-choice, true–false, short answer, completion,
matching, and essay questions are used to measure learning in the cognitive domain. These tests are
appropriate when several people are expected to learn the same content or material. Sometimes, both a pretest
and a posttest are used to measure learning. This method assists in controlling variables, but be careful not to
attribute all the changes noted on the posttest to the learning experiences since other factors may have been
involved.

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