AIDS Education in Middle School

Abstract

AIDS education for adolescents has become a major concern. Not only are adolescents one of the fastest growing groups of individuals becoming infected with HIV, they are also one of the most challenging groups to reach with this vitally important information. Although previous studies have found that the content of an AIDS educational curriculum is important, they also show that teachers' presentation styles have a significant impact upon the effectiveness of lessons about AIDS. This study of twelve health and physical education teachers teaching about AIDS, looked at how their perceptions and attitudes about the task at hand influenced their teaching strategies. The study found that these twelve teachers had a variety of concerns about their roles as AIDS educators, and that their concerns impacted their level of commitment to teaching about AIDS. Through classroom observations and in-depth interviews, three distinct categorizations of commitment by the teachers were found: teachers who were "enthusiastically committed", teachers who were "unenthusiastically committed" and teachers who were "uncommitted".