Evaluation of a brief school-based e-cigarette prevention program for elementary school students

E-cigarette use remains high among children and adolescents. School-based programs that address reasons for use, provide education on risks, and improve refusal skills are important in preventing e-cigarette use. However, we lack evidence-based e-cigarette prevention programs for elementary school students. This program evaluation assesses changes in learning outcomes, refusal skills, coping skills, social self-efficacy, and intentions to use e-cigarettes following implementation of a school-based e-cigarette prevention curriculum.

Participants in this pre-post evaluation design were 165 fifth-graders from three elementary schools in the San Francisco Bay Area who participated in Stanford REACH Lab's You and Me, Together Vape-free two-session elementary school vaping prevention curriculum. Participants completed pre- and post-curriculum surveys to assess exposure to use, learning outcomes, refusal skills, coping skills, self-efficacy, and intentions to use. The final sample was N = 130, as 130 of the 165 pre-post responses were successfully linked.

Participants demonstrated improvements in all eight knowledge questions (p's < 0.01), two self-efficacy questions, and one refusal skills question (p's < 0.05). More than 43% of participants (44.2% pre-curriculum survey and 43.8% post-curriculum survey) responded "True" to the statement, "I have somebody close to me, such as a parent, sibling, or friend who uses e-cigarettes/vapes." All participating teachers who responded to a feedback survey (n = 5) indicated vaping either is currently a problem at their elementary school or that it is becoming one.

Evaluation of this elementary school-based e-cigarette prevention curriculum indicated that the curriculum increased knowledge of e-cigarettes and related harms.