Vol 59 (1), Mar 2015

 

Nutrition education is an important component of public health prevention and nutrition educators need to be adequately trained to build self-efficacy (SE) in teaching. Service-learning (SL) is a pedagogy that combines academic learning with service in the community, making it an ideal framework for undergraduate institutions to prepare students to be nutrition educators. In order to test the hypothesis that a SL course increases students’ SE in teaching nutrition in the community, researchers developed the SET-NC survey and administered it to students enrolled in a Community Nutrition course (experimental group) and a Public Health Nutrition course (control group). Results indicate that there was a significant increase in SE over the course of the semester in the experimental group but not in the control group. Therefore, this SL course increased future nutrition educators’ SE in teaching nutrition in the community and the course design may provide insight into the development of future SL courses designed to increase students’ SE in teaching health and science in the community. Additionally, future validation of the SET-NC survey may result in a useful tool for instructors seeking to measure students’ SE in teaching nutrition in the community.