The Oakland Schools AIDS Prevention Project (OSAP) will focus on an AIDS high-risk, multiethnic, urban population of elementary school children to ascertain their beliefs and concepts of health and disease processes, specifically AIDS, so that an effective AIDS preventive curriculum may be developed. Major strengths of this project include: 1) a unique coalition of a public school system, parent and community leaders, community organizations, and health professional which will oversee and participate actively in the project; 2) the rich ethnic diversity present in the Oakland public schools; 3) application of research techniques appropriate to emotional and to cognitive development in 6-12 year old children; 4) strong evaluation components for each step of the project; and 5) implementation in a population of vulnerable children for whom AIDS prevention is critical Key features of the OSAP Elementary School Projection are that it reinforces links within a broad coalition of multicultural community and academic groups and extends this coalitions's preliminary research that lays critical groundwork for the current proposal. The OSAP Elementary School project is designed to gather critical information about: 1) children's concepts of infectious diseases; 2) psychological correlates of disease concepts; 3) sociocultural correlates of disease concepts; and 4) educational implications based on a multiethnic, elementary school children's understanding of disease processes. To accomplish these goals, a 3-year project is proposed. The first year will be devoted to the development of the instrument with pilot testing in 1st, 3rd and 5th graders, training of individuals (including bilingual personnel) to administer the instrument, training of teachers and doing the necessary community outreach to successfully implement this program in a multicultural community. The second year will be primarily devoted to administering the instrument to 300 elementary school children evenly divided among Black, Latino and White 1st, 3rd and 5th graders. ADditionally, the parents of these students will be surveyed in the second year so that additional information about the sociocultural correlates of disease concepts can be ascertained. The third year will be used for data analysis, dissemination of information and working with the Oakland Unified School District to evaluate the educational implications of the information and to begin to plan appropriate curricula.
