Evaluation of school based drug prevention curriculum for adolescents

This experimental study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Drug prevention curriculum designed to prevent drug abuse among school-going adolescents in Punjab, India. The Drug prevention curriculum included information dissemination and skill training approaches of Drug Prevention. A sample of 285 high school adolescents in the ages 16-18 years were selected from the public schools of Patiala City. Evaluation was by means of a true experimental pre-test-post-test design with random assignments to experimental and control groups. The students in the control and experimental groups completed pre-test and post-test questionnaires on Drug Use, Knowledge about drugs, Drug attitude, Drug avoidance self-efficacy, and Drug refusal skills. The data was analyzed using paired, independent t-tests and Cohen’s d to study the significance and effect size of the Drug prevention curriculum. Relative to the Control Group, the Drug prevention Curriculum participants of the experimental group reported improvement in drug avoidance self-efficacy and drug refusal skills with moderate to large effect sizes. The participants of the experimental groups showed substantial gains in knowledge about drug abuse and its consequences and lesser drug-related problems with large effect sizes, with the exception of drug attitudes. The robust findings of the experimental study suggest the potential efficacy of Drug Prevention curriculum in reducing drug usage among adolescents. It is, therefore, recommended to implement the Drug prevention curriculum in schools of Punjab to combat rising drug abuse related problems among school-going adolescents.