HEALTH PROMOTION THROUGH FACILITATING MASTERY, PARTICIPATION AND MOTIVATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

Mental health issues have been on the increase for years in Norway, and after the pandemic, school absence has also increased.To meet these challenges, several national initiatives have been launched.New curricula emphasizing life mastery and public health have been implemented.In addition, various health promotion projects have been developed and executed in schools as part of a national public health program.The current study will present experiences from a project called SAMM -A systematic approach to mastery, participation, and motivation, where a five-step method has been applied, and relate this to a recently developed framework for health promotion in school.The five-step method for mastery, participation, and motivation applied included the following questions: 1) What is important in your life, and what goals do you have?2) What about yourself and your life is good?Can you use this to achieve your goals? 3) Is there something in yourself or in general that stops you from reaching your goals?4) What do you choose to work with the next month to achieve your goals?and 5) What will you do to carry this out?A quasi-experimental study with test and control groups was carried out, including an intervention of four sessions spread over about a month.In the first session, the teacher led a class discussion concerning how the students felt they mastered school and life in general, what was easy, and what was difficult; then, the students wrote anonymous answers to the three first questions, which the teacher collected.In the second session, the teacher summed up the answers from the students, and the final two questions were discussed before they wrote individual, anonymous answers.In the final two sessions, the students evaluated their own plans and efforts and adjusted for the next period.Seven upper secondary school classes were included as test groups, resulting in 132 student participants.Five control groups were included, resulting in 132 control students.Finding an appropriate scale to measure the effects of the intervention proved challenging.The General self-efficacy scale was used despite a rather limited focus.An ANOVA analysis was carried out, and no significant difference was observed between the test and control groups over time.However, the approach in the intervention relates to several aspects of health promotion, and a more extensive scale covering more of these aspects would perhaps have been more adequate to measure possible effects.