The Effect of an Educational Intervention on COVID-19 Awareness, Preventive Behaviors, and Risk Perceptions among Secondary School Students

Abstract

Objectives: To determine the impact of an educational intervention on secondary school students' Covid-19 awareness and risk perception, as well as their preventive practices. Study design and settings: A quasi-experimental study conducted in private secondary schools. Methodology: The study duration was two months. Students who gave consent and didn’t have COVID-19 infection in past were included by non-probability purposive sampling. Raosoft sample size calculator was used to calculate the sample size and it came out to be 385 but a total of 380 students could be enrolled. Among these, 37 responses were invalid making the total sample size to be 343. Ethical approval was taken from the institutional ethical review committee with approval letter number i.e. ERC/ID/126. SPSS version 25 was used for the analysis of data. Frequencies and percentages were calculated. Paired samples T-test was applied to see the difference in participants’ scores before and after the intervention. A p-value = 0.05 was taken as significant. Results: The knowledge of students were improved from moderate to high level and the total percentile score from 74.86% to 89.76% after intervention. Their practicing preventive behaviors were at a low level with scores of 69.37%. Their risk perceptions remained at moderate levels and did not see any improvement. Conclusion: Participants practicing preventive behaviors were at a low level. Their knowledge scores improved from moderate to high level after intervention but their risk perceptions remained at moderate levels and no change was seen.