Adolescent Outcomes in Mental Health InSciEd Out

Integrated Science Education Outreach (InSciEd Out) is one novel program that seeks to promote scientific and health literacy through fostering scientific inquiry. The guiding premise of InSciEd Out's health promotion arm is a concept called Prescription Education (PE), which uses science education as a direct and early intervention for disease behaviors. The underlying hypothesis of InSciEd Out PE is that a student who lives a scientific experience in his or her own voice (undergoes true inquiry-based science) will be empowered to elect healthier behaviors in any targeted health paradigm. PE's proposed mechanism of change is that inquiry-based science catalyzes transitions from knowledge to understanding to attitudes to intents to actual behavioral change.

InSciEd Out partnership with the the school in this study began in Spring of 2013 with a projected health promotion arm targeting mental health and addiction. The current iteration of the partnership commenced in Summer of 2014 under the annual InSciEd Out summer internship. This internship led to creation of grades 7 and 8 curriculum in mental health and addiction. Version 1 of this curriculum was piloted last year. A revised version of the curriculum will be implemented in Spring of 2016. Although there are education-specific metrics for assessment already built into program evaluation of InSciEd Out, there are currently no clinically relevant inventories in place to specifically probe efficacy of the lesson plans upon key mental health outcomes.

The study herein is the establishment of clinically relevant inventories around implemented InSciEd Out curriculum in mental health and addiction (called My Mind, My Body). These inventories are selected to measure student changes in their mental health-related knowledge, attitudes, and help-seeking behavioral intentions. The research group hypothesizes that students undergoing InSciEd Out mental health and addiction curriculum will exhibit pre-post increases in mental health literacy, decreases in mental health stigmatization, and increases in mental health help-seeking behavioral intentions.