Need Help with Health Education Curriculum? Check Out the HECAT!

January 10, 2008 - According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), health education is essential to an overall school health program, and choosing and developing a good health education curriculum is necessary to ensure that a health education program is effectively promoting healthy behaviors.  Nevertheless, choosing an appropriate health education curriculum can be difficult when there is little or no structure and focus.  Within that context, the CDC developed HECAT – a Health Education Curriculum Analysis Tool.

The tool builds on the characteristics of effective health education curricula and the National Health Education Standards and provides guidance and appraisal tools to improve curriculum selection and development, and provides guidelines for carrying out a complete and consistent examination of health education curricula.  The HECAT:

  • Includes a description of school health education;
  • Provides background information on reviewing and selecting health education curricula; and
  • Offers tools to analyze both commercially packaged or locally developed school-based health education curricula.

The HECAT addresses an array of health topics including physical activity, healthy eating, tobacco, and alcohol and other drugs.  It highlights the importance of using science to improve practice; having family and community involved in the review and selection of curriculum; as well as local authority in setting health education priorities, determining health education content, and making curriculum selection decisions.  It also emphasizes that flexibility in accommodating different values, priorities, and curriculum needs of communities and schools is essential.   

Intended users of the HECAT include: state or regional education agency staff; curriculum committees or educators at school districts, schools or community-based organizations; developers of nationally disseminated and packaged-curricula, such as non-governmental organizations and for-profit curriculum development companies; and institutions of higher education teacher preparation programs.

For additional information, please contact CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health at cdc-info@cdc.gov or 800-CDC-INFO.

Source: "HECAT - Health Education Curriculum Analysis Tool," CDC, December 2007.


 

 
 
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