An investigation of the effectiveness of sexual education program for 6th grade students

Objective of the present study was to develop a sexual education program for sixth grade students and to test efficacy of the developed program. A semi-experimental design with control group and pre-test and post-test was used in the present study.Experimental group of the study was chosen from sixth grade students attending to Evrenseloglu Primary School representing the middle socio-economical level in Bornova county of Izmir City in school year of 2012-2013. The control group of the study study was chosen from the students of sixth grade attending to General Izzettin Çalislar Primary School representing the middle socio-economical level in Bornova.In the present study, Sexual Health Knowledge and Attitude Inventory developed as a part of current study was used as data collecting tool. Each session of the program consisting of the a total of eight sessions was conducted for 80 minutes weekly. Sexual education program of eight sessions was performed in the experimental group whereas no education was given in the control group.The data were analyzed by multi-variable ANOVA (MANOVA), Box-M, Shapiro-Wilk?s test and discriminant analysis and SPSS software v.16.0 was used for statistical analyses. For analyzing the data, significance level was chosed as 0.001 for Box-M test and as 0.05 for all other tests.As a result of the current study it was found that there was statistically significant increase in knowledge level on changes during the adolescence period in the experimental group and statistically significantly positive changes in the friend and romantic relationships, ability to say ?No? and making decision, physical and emotional abuse, and attitudes in social gender issues, and statistically significant decrease in misbelieves about the adolescence period and sexuality.KEYWORDS: Puberty, sexual education, sexuality.