Tenk Nøye! pilot prosjekt – adapting Informed Health Choices learning resources for a Norwegian school: Protocol

Background: Adults and young people alike are bombarded with health claims every day. These health claims may be as seemingly innocuous as “you will catch a cold if you don’t wear a coat” to claims about treatments, medicines, or health actions that may have potentially serious negative side effects. Many of these health claims are not supported by trustworthy evidence, and many people do not have the skills to adequately assess their reliability. Critical thinking skills are important for being able to assess the trustworthiness of health claims, and primary school is an ideal time to begin teaching these skills. By beginning early, we can lay the groundwork for continued learning, and enable children and young people to make health choices as they grow up. Most schools do not teach these skills in a systematic way, and there are few resources available for teaching critical health literacy that have been rigorously developed and evaluated. As a response, we developed the Informed Health Choices primary school resources. Using human-centred design methods, the resources were developed via user testing and pilots in schools in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Norway. Findings from a large trial in Uganda indicated that the resources are effectives. Furthermore, teachers and children in all four countries thought the resources were relevant for their settings. However, user feedback in Norway was collected in 2014 from the Oslo International School using English resources. We are unsure how Norwegian IHC resources used now in Norwegian schools (where Norwegian is the teaching language) will be perceived. If the resources are not considered to be suitable for use in Norwegian schools, we need to know what the problems are and how we might resolve them.

Objectives: To explore and describe teachers’ and children’s user experiences of the resources, and to suggest how the resources might be made more useful, easy to use, understandable, credible, desirable, and well-suited for use in Norwegian schools.

Methods: We will carry out a school pilot over three weeks, consisting of nine lessons and the CLAIM questionnaire at the end. We will observe lessons and conduct user-test interviews with the teacher and focus group discussions with students. We will collate findings and rate them according to seriousness for the user experience. We will check our interpretations with an advisory group and the pilot teachers and children and solicit additional suggestions.

Results: This work will result in a description of teachers and children’s user experiences of the IHC primary school resources and a proposed list of changes that might improve users’ experiences in Norwegian schools.