Educational Intervention In Nutritional Health For Public School Children Educators: An Evaluative Study

The objective of the study was to carry out a training and nutritional education program, aimed at child educators from a Municipal Network of Early Childhood Education, regarding dietary practices and school feeding, evaluating their effectiveness and verifying possible associations with the education of these child educators. This is a pre-experimental study, of the pre-test and post-test type, carried out without a control group. The sample consisted of 224 preschool teachers from 15 Municipal Centers for Early Childhood Education, who participated in a Course on Health Promotion and Pedagogical Practice in Early Childhood Education, consisting of two modules. Sociodemographic data, physical activity and anthropometric data were reported using a questionnaire. A Nutritional Knowledge Questionnaire was used to measure individuals' knowledge of nutrition and to assess knowledge acquisition, after Nutritional Intervention, a questionnaire on a 7-point Likert scale. The educational intervention data were analyzed using the paired t-test, considering p < 0.05. The average score of nutritional knowledge before educational intervention was 8.1 +/- 2.0 points, observing a predominance of moderate nutritional knowledge among child educators (68%). Through the paired t-test, a difference (p < 0.001) was observed between the average grades after (5.07) and before (3.4) the nutritional intervention program, without, however, having a difference between the school stratification of the students. participants (p-value = 0.26). The proposed food and nutritional intervention program proved to be simple and effective for improving the knowledge about food and nutrition of early childhood educators.