Drug education practice: results of an observational study

Understanding normative practice in drug education is a key to identifying means of improving preventive intervention outcomes. In this paper, we repo rt findings of an observational study in which drug education in multiple p eriods of 146 middle school classes was categorized minute-by-minute accord ing to the type of instruction provided to students. Results indicate that nearly half of all drug education focused on providing students with knowle dge. Alternative methods, particularly those that have shown programmatic e ffectiveness, and those that address risk and protective factors known to b e highly predictive of drug use onset, were relatively ignored. Further, te achers showed relatively low consistency in understanding concepts other th an knowledge based on comparisons of their ratings of intended instructions with those of trained observers. Nonetheless, there is evidence that some teachers systematically attempted to address drug prevention from either a social influence or an affective education perspective. These findings sugg est that if improvements in the effectiveness of drug education are to be s een in the future, a relatively radical transformation of approaches to tea ching will be needed.