Learning-by-Teaching Approach Improves Dengue Knowledge in Children and Parents

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Health Education
• Infectious Disease Prevention

Background:

• Limited evidence exists on effective dengue prevention information dissemination strategies.
• Social habits play a crucial role in dengue prevention capacity.
• Investigating children as health educators offers a novel approach to knowledge transmission.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of children as health educators in dengue prevention.
• To assess knowledge acquisition in children who teach their parents about dengue.
• To compare parents' knowledge gain from children versus other learning methods.

Main Methods:

• Two cluster randomized parallel trials involving 142 children and 97 parents in a tropical area of Argentina.
• Study 1: Compared dengue knowledge dynamics in 10-year-old children using different teaching methods (unrelated topic, booklet, teaching parents, teaching parents with booklet).
• Study 2: Assessed parental knowledge change after interaction with children versus learning from an expert or an unrelated topic.

Main Results:

• Children who taught their parents using a booklet showed significantly more correct responses (2.53 more) compared to those who listened to an unrelated topic.
• Parents learned as much from their children as from an expert, and significantly more than from an unrelated topic.
• Parents demonstrated increased correct responses (1.49 with booklet, 1.94 without booklet) after being taught by their children.

Conclusions:

• Prompting children to teach consolidates their own knowledge and effectively disseminates dengue prevention information to parents.
• Children teaching their parents is a viable, low-to-no-cost strategy for public health information sharing.
• This approach enhances both child learning and community-wide knowledge of dengue prevention.