In 2015, TN had the 9th highest teen birth rate in the United States. School-based sex education programs have shown promise in curbing teen pregnancy rates. In TN public schools, sex education could be taught by teachers of subjects like biology, health education, or invited guests from ministries, or national or local nonprofit agencies. The content, rigor, and approach of sex education taught by these diverse groups of providers remains unknown. This pilot study tested a survey questionnaire and methodology, while providing information on the providers’ sex education practices and perspectives. We adapted validated measures from past sex education surveys to reflect the context of TN. The survey items were reviewed and refined by diverse groups of experts on school-based health education, teen pregnancy prevention programs, and adolescent health. The survey was created and distributed via a web-based tool. A recruitment email or letter with a weblink to the survey was sent to 3,249 potential sex education providers, from April to June 2017. Of all contacts, 509 completed the survey, yielding a response rate of 15.7%. Of those who completed the survey, 137 taught sex education in the 2015-2016 school year to any of grades 5 through 12 students. Survey responses were analyzed using descriptive tests. Abstinence (83.9%) was taught by most respondents, by grade 12, but far less respondents taught topics related to birth control (65.0%) and condoms: how to use condoms (22.6%), how to use and where to get other birth control (31.4%). Providers with more years of experience, and those who expressed that they had received enough training, were more likely to teach more number of topics, including controversial topics, such as condoms and birth control. Most providers indicated that sex education topics should be taught in earlier grades. This study identified the job titles of providers, content being taught, approach to teaching, and how providers would want to teach sex education. Identifying providers is crucial to designing sex education training programs, tracking program effectiveness, and changes in practices over time, to achieve the goal of curbing TN teen pregnancy rates through quality sex education.

High school youth in Grades 9-12 who are in public schools without comprehensive sexual health education (CSHED) are more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behaviors and have higher rates of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases than are their peers in schools with CSHED. The purpose of this correlational study was to explore the statistical relationship between the consistent implementation of CSHED, before and after the enactment of the Chicago Public Schools' (CPS) sexual health education policy, and the sexual risk behaviors of Chicago high school youth in Grades 9-12. The study was based on Antonovsky's salutogenic model of health and wellbeing. CPS students' sexual risk behaviors were analyzed using data obtained from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) for the years of 2007 and 2013. Logistic regression was used to estimate prevalence and odds ratios of each sexual risk behavior. The findings showed a complex pattern of and variances across the sexual risk behaviors analyzed. The prevalence of sexual behaviors among all students remained relatively stable. The prevalence estimates for students who drank alcohol or used drugs before the last sexual encounter and who were never taught about AIDS or HIV increased from 2007 to 2013. The likelihood of not using birth control pills before the last sexual intercourse encounter decreased among Black students; the likelihood that Hispanic/Latino students ever had sex, and had sex with 4 or more people in their life, decreased. The decrease of sexual risk behaviors indicates a positive influence by CSHED, while the increases indicate continuing challenges to the promotion of healthy sexual behaviors. These findings show the need for legislators and school administrators to increase support for the enactment of CSHED policy to help mitigate the sexual risk behaviors of high school youth.

Student voice could improve the effectiveness of sex education curricula, student input, however, is generally limited or totally absent in sex education development. This dissertation explores student content preferences in sex education curricula and how school officials can incorporate student feedback to ensure content is relevant, relatable, and reliable. Results also show that adolescents are in favor of receiving social media-delivered sex education from local health departments. To build an adolescent following and greater awareness about SNS accounts that disseminate sex education, participants suggested LHDs 1) inform intended audiences about products by building offline connections 2) use promotions to create awareness 3) emphasize price during giveaways, publicize free services and 4) use the right people to motivate others to follow accounts.

In this paper I intend to discuss the ways in which sex, sexuality, and the female body are treated in the discourse within the Evangelical movement, particularly with regard to teenaged and young girls. I will focus on the way young women are talked to about sex, and how they are socialized and educated to regard sexuality and gender. I will spend most of my time with the popular literature aimed at young women, analyzing the underlying theology and theory at work. I will extrapolate, through the use of the (admittedly limited) data regarding sexual activity among young Evangelicals, including but not limited to the age of first sex, and the rate of non-penetrative sex acts, the results of the current ethic, and how it is affecting the lives of young women in America. By the end of this paper I hope to be able to suggest an alternative ethic, one that is sex-positive while still leaving open the option to teach abstinent behavior.

Sexual development and interest in sex is a normal part of adolescent development, but the negative outcomes of unprotected intercourse can result in life changing consequences such as an unplanned pregnancy or a sexually transmitted infection. Although the prevalence of these consequences have improvement over the past decade, the United States still has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates and highest prevalence of youth sexually transmitted infection among developed countries. In this report, the determinants that lead adolescents to engage in sex and fail to use contraceptives are reviewed. With knowledge on what factors contribute to adolescent sexual risk taking behaviors, counseling strategies can be implemented to prevent and intervene, and the school counselor is in a prime setting for delivery. The prevention strategies that are covered in this review are grouped into five categories. They are education, skill building, enhancing student development, involving parents and families, and implementing programs. / text

The aim of the thesis was to explore the impact of sex education in the family on own intimate life of the individual. The work is divided into theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part describes issues that affect the content of thesis - human sexuality, sex education at school and in family, and individual family surrounding. The practical part describes the implemented research. The research aim was formulated in four hypotheses. The first aim was to verify whether young people perceive sex education in the family as something that affects their intimate lives. The second aim was to verify the connection between points of view that parents present to their children about contraception, abortion and the beginning of sexual life and the view that in adulthood these children hold. Next aim was to determine whether there is the coherence between the way how parents talk to their children about sexuality and by how much is at the beginning of children own sexual life affected by these councils. And lastly, the work seeks to map the way how parents talk with children about sexuality and whether that affects children own experience of sexuality. In research took part 137 respondents - 80 women and 57 men, all respondents had secondary or university education and were aged from 21 to 30 years....

This project studies the theological legacy of white evangelical purity culture (WEPC) and proposes a constructive Baptist practical theology of baptism in response. It foregrounds the activism and testimonies of Christian women to foment and intervene in white supremacist constructions of womanhood in the Female Moral Reform movement; to perpetuate and prevent racial violence in the lynching era through the deployment of a reimagined vision of sacred white womanhood; and to expand conceptions of the wounding legacies, persisting challenges, and alternative visions proposed by those harmed by WEPC. In the “afterlife” of white evangelical purity culture, baptism, conceived as a practice of solidarity, is a critical intervention to the persistent and problematic deformations of identity, salvation, and ecclesial formation. The project begins with analysis of the theopolitical history of WEPC and its founding frameworks and promises. It then turns to the Female Moral Reform movement, and particularly the activism and theological arguments of Sarah Grimké and a dissenting interlocutor in 1838, to illustrate how questions of womanhood, race, and women’s rights were forged in the context of institutional slavery. Next, this project engages the activism of Rebecca Felton, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, attends to the character de/formations deployed in women’s activism and rhetoric supportive of and against lynching, and argues that the uninterrogated sacred status of white womanhood prevents a full acknowledgement and dismantling of the regnant theological frameworks of WEPC. It then frames the online writing as testimonies to the wounding experiences in WEPC, offering an emergent tripartite framework of shame, misplaced blame, and silence to capture the impact of WEPC. Finally, drawing from the works of James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Ada María Isasi-Díaz and M. Shawn Copeland, it proposes a Baptist theology of baptism wherein baptism is revelatory rite that initiates solidarity in the service of a world that engenders the possibility of mutual liberation and human flourishing. This project contributes to the growing literature on WEPC by exposing the raced theological scaffolding that necessitate a transformation of core Christian practices. / 2022-12-09T00:00:00Z

Thesis advisor: Henry Braun / There is a broad interest in narrowing achievement gaps among all groups of students and improving education by scientifically sound methods. On October 25, 2006, the United States Department of Education published new regulations allowing single-sex education in public schools whenever schools think it will improve student achievement. Thus far, studies comparing single-sex with coeducational schools have been carried out at the national level mostly in England, Australia and Jamaica, while US' studies were limited to Catholic schools. Few studies reported descriptive statistics or effect sizes and most studies differ in the criteria and statistical controls they use to compare single-sex and coeducation. This dissertation presents models for science achievement and attitudes towards science for 8th -grade students attending either single-sex or coeducation schools in Hong Kong and New Zealand, using the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) datasets from 1995, 1999, and 2003. To properly account for the nested structure of data, an HLM model was estimated for each sex, for each of the two jurisdictions at three time points, corresponding to the three TIMSS administrations. The within - country results were compared to see if differences between single-sex and coed schools were consistent over time. In addition, this dissertation proposed an approach to examine the sensitivity of the estimated effects of school-type on student outcomes to the presence of unmeasured variables which may introduce hidden selection bias, using a modification of the method proposed by Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983). Based on its conditional distribution with an instrumental variable, chosen based on the review of single-sex literature, the Monte Carlo simulated values of the unobserved variable were used as level-1 predictors in a one-way ANCOVA with random effects. The sensitivity analysis was limited to science achievement of Hong-Kong's girls in TIMSS 2003. Findings show that single-sex education contributed to girls' science performance and attitudes in NZL 1999 and HKG 1999 and 2003, and low sensitivity for school-type contrast. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation.

Introdução: A adolescência é caracterizada por marcantes mudanças biológicas e psíquicas. Nesta fase, o aumento da produção dos androgênios resulta na ativação do comportamento sexual o que pode contribuir para uma iniciação sexual precoce. Objetivos: Os objetivos deste estudo foram verificar a idade média da primeira relação sexual dos adolescentes matriculados em escolas estaduais do município de Ribeirão Preto/SP, bem como verificar o número médio de parceiros dos alunos e a frequência do uso de métodos anticoncepcionais e uso de preservativos nesta população. Métodos: Trata-se de um estudo transversal para o qual foram incluídos os adolescentes do ensino médio. As informações sobre idade da primeira relação sexual, o número de parceiros dos alunos, uso de métodos anticoncepcionais e uso de preservativos foram obtidas por meio de um questionário semiestruturado. As variáveis quantitativas foram expressas em média e desvio padrão e as qualitativas em frequências absolutas e relativas. O teste qui-quadrado para variáveis qualitativas e o teste t-student para variáveis contínuas foram empregados para comparar as médias de idade e idade da primeira relação sexual de acordo com o gênero dos alunos. Todas as análises estatísticas foram realizadas com o auxílio do programa SAS, versão 9.4. Resultados: Foram avaliados 202 alunos que responderam ao questionário, sendo 69 (34.16 %) homens e 133 (65,84%) mulheres. A idade da sexarca para homens variou de 7 a 18 anos e para mulheres de 7 a 17 anos, onde 48 (36.01%) das meninas e 21 (30,43%) dos meninos cursavam o primeiro ano do ensino médio, 63,37% dos adolescentes revelaram já ter tido relação sexual que 56,25 % usaram preservativo na primeira relação sexual, mas 36,72% disseram que fazem sexo seguro na maioria das vezes e 83,59% confirmaram que tiveram a primeira relação sexual por estarem \"a fim\". Conclusão: Mais da metade dos estudantes de escolas pública tiveram iniciação sexual precoce, na qual, a maioria não usou preservativo nem um método anticoncepcional efetivo; gostariam de receber informações sobre a temática através dos pais e professores e as principais motivações para iniciação sexual foram estarem a fim e experimentação / Introduction: Adolescence is characterized by significant biological and psychic changes. At this stage, increased production of androgens results in the activation of sexual behavior which may contribute to early sexual initiation. Objectives: The objectives of this study were to verify the average age of the first sexual intercourse of adolescents enrolled in state schools in the city of Ribeirão Preto / SP, and to verify the average number of students\' partners and the frequency of contraceptive use and condom use in this school. population. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study to which high school adolescents were included. Information on the age of first sexual intercourse, the number of partners of the students, use of contraceptive methods and use of condoms were obtained through a semi-structured questionnaire. Quantitative variables were expressed as mean and standard deviation and qualitative variables were expressed in absolute and relative frequencies. The chi-square test for qualitative variables and the t-student test for continuous variables were used to compare the means of age and age of the first sexual relation according to the gender of the students. All statistical analyzes were developed with the help of the SAS program, version 9.4. Results: We evaluated 202 students who answered the questionnaire, being 69 (36.36%) men and 133 (63.64%) women. The sex age for men ranged from 7 to 18 years and for women aged 7 to 17 years, with 48 (36.01%) of the girls and 21 (30.43%) of the boys attended the first year of high school, 66,94% of adolescents reported sexual intercourse with 56.25% used a condom at the first sexual intercourse, but 36.72% said they had safe sex most part of the time and 83.59% confirmed that they had their first sexual intercourse happened because they \"have a crush on\". Conclusion: More than half of public school students had early sexual initiation, in which most did not use condom or effective contraceptive method; would like to receive information on the subject through parents and teachers and the main motivations for sexual initiation were personal choice and curiosity

A complexidade da sexualidade humana, bem como a admissão da existência de uma diversidade sexual foram (e ainda são) rechaçadas na escola, ocasionando não raro a discriminação e a exclusão de alunos/as que não se enquadram nos padrões heterossexistas prestigiados socialmente. Por essa razão, nesta pesquisa, investigam-se as representações que professores/as do Ensino Médio de duas escolas públicas paulistanas têm sobre homossexualidade e diversidade sexual no cotidiano escolar, buscando-se um maior aprofundamento teórico e interpretativo. Para chegar ao objetivo proposto, a pesquisa de campo foi realizada com base em um questionário semiestruturado, com questões abertas e fechadas. Como referencial teórico, utilizaram-se autores da área dos Estudos Culturais (teoria queer) e dos teóricos da Representação Social. Os dados quantitativos da pesquisa foram apresentados em forma de gráfico comparativo (entre as duas escolas), e os dados qualitativos foram divididos em três blocos de interpretação (representações, formação de professores e diversidade sexual na escola) e analisados em três categorias de análise, com base nas falas dos/as professores/as: 1) representações da homossexualidade sob viés de preconceito evidente; 2) representações da homossexualidade sob viés de preconceito latente; 3) representações da homossexualidade na perspectiva democrática e inclusiva. Os resultados obtidos são de grande relevância para a Educação Sexual, bem como para a cultura do respeito à diversidade, pois permitem detectar as diferentes formas com que o preconceito a cidadãos não heterossexuais instalam-se na escola. Além disso, os resultados evidenciam que a conexão entre discriminação e homossexualidade funda-se em uma questão cultural, enraizada em dogmas, crenças e representações construídas socialmente para conservar a hegemonia da heterossexualidade e, por conseguinte, subalternizar e inferiorizar as orientações sexuais consideradas não-padrão. / The complexity of human sexuality, as well as the admission of the existence of sexual diversity were (and still are) rejected by the school, often leading to discrimination and exclusion of students that do not fit in socially prestigious heterosexist standards. Therefore, in this research are investigated the representations that teachers of two public paulistana\'s high schools have about homosexuality and sexual diversity in school life, seeking a deeper theoretical and interpretive approach. To reach the objective, the field research was conducted based on a semi-structured questionnaire with open and closed questions. The theoretical authors used were from Cultural Studies field (queer theory) and the theory of Social Representation. Quantitative data from the survey were presented in a comparative graph form (between the two schools), and qualitative data were divided into three blocks of interpretation (representation, teachers formation and sexual diversity in school) and analyzed in three categories of analysis, based on the speech of the teacher: 1) representations of homosexuality under the bias of evident prejudice, 2) representations of homosexuality under latent prejudice bias, 3) representations of homosexuality in a democratic and inclusive perspective. The results are of great relevance to sexual education and to the culture of respect for diversity, it can detect the different ways that prejudice against non-heterosexual citizens is established in school. Furthermore, the results show that the connection between discrimination and homosexuality is based on a cultural issue, rooted in dogmas, beliefs and representations socially constructed to preserve the hegemony of heterosexuality and consequently to undervalue and to degrade sexual orientations considered nonstandard.