The effects of school sex education programs: a review of the literature.

Abstract

This paper describes the methods used in the evaluation of sex education programs and then examines the impact of programs upon knowledge attitudes and behavior. The most common method of analyzing the effects of sex education program utilizes the experimental design. The sex education class is considered the experimental group; some other class or group of students is considered the control group. Studies using this design have 2 major strenghts: by comparing the change in scores of the control group and the experimental group various types of errors can be eliminated or controlled; and when students take a pretest complete the course and then take the posttest this resembles their normal testing routine and appears natural. Yet these experimental studies contain several weaknesses which limit the validity of their conclusions or generalizations: most of the studies evaluate single programs which have not been randomly selected; evaluators are rarely able to randomly assign students to experimental and control groups; very few of the studies measure longterm effects of the course; questionnaires or measuring instruments are often poorly designed; and many studies report the statistical significance of the findings but few provide good indicators for the magnitude of change. A second but less common method of analyzing the effects of sex education programs employ a survey design. Surveys cannot easily control for all other confounding factors such as normal maturation process. Moreover past surveys have failed to ask sufficient questions about the sex education sources for the researchers to know how much sex education was actually taught. Thus few surveys are discussed in this article. Numerous studies of both high school and college classes have used experimental designs to measure the impact of sex education courses upon the knowledge of the students. Their findings are nearly unanimous -- instruction in sex education does substantially increase knowledge of sexuality. The studies of high school programs indicate that sexuality courses so increase the tolerance of the students attitudes toward the sexual practices of others. A few studies also indicate that the students become somewhat more comfortable with masturbation for themselves as a result of the course. The beliefs that students have about their own sexual behavior with others do not appear to change. Thus the concern that sex education in high school will make students less moral is not substantiated by the literature. The studies of college students strongly indicate that some college sexuality courses do increase tolerance or acceptance of different types of sexual behavior both for self and especially for others. The studies of college classes indicate that they do not affect sexual behavior. The studies fail to support sex education proponents who believe classes may reduce sexual behavior. They do indicate that units on contraception will increase the use of more effective contraceptives and decrease sexual activity with poor or no contraception.