Proposal for a Disaster Management Drill Program for High School Students Who Have Never Experienced a Disaster to Foster a Sense of “Awareness that Disaster Affects Everyone”

Abstract

In this study, the authors propose a disaster management drill program for high school students. The program is designed to develop, among high school students, “the awareness that disasters affect themselves,” instead of being “someone else’s problem.” The program was developed in accordance with the ADDIE model of instructional design theory. Sayo High School in Sayo Town, Hyogo Prefecture, which was severely damaged by the flood in 2009, was selected as the program target. Since this school’s disaster management activities had primarily translated into a passive disaster management drill wherein students moved to an evacuation site according to the instructions of the teachers, we set two goals: “knowing past disasters and the current situation, and understanding the risks at the time of disaster” and “knowing the problems that occur at the time of disaster and understanding what action you should take.” In order to arouse interest among high school students, the authors incorporated drones for evacuation drills and gaming teaching materials for disaster management awareness into the program. We designed and implemented a program that ended in the morning, and compared the level of achievement on 21 learning objectives before and after the program. The results revealed a statistically significant rise in all of the 21 objectives. In addition, the results of factor analysis show that the program enabled the students to develop a sense of awareness that disasters affect everyone, understand the risks their communities would face during disasters, such as earthquakes and floods, and realize what they should do to manage this risk.