This project plans to use innovative techniques to produce a video-based educational curriculum module for children (grades 3-6) designed to reduce stereotypes and misperceptions about peers with disabilities. Research demonstrates a pervasive problem with negative attitudes and false perceptions toward peers with disabilities. The curriculum will include videos dramatizing interactions with peers with four high prevalence disabilities, including deafness, paraplegia, learning disabilities, and AIDS as a socially stigmatized condition and will also include chapters with reinforcing reading and activities to boost the effectiveness of the intervention. The phase II testing protocol will test the effectiveness of the curriculum using a pre-test, post-test (longitudinal) design, and will assess the pro-health impact of the curriculum in terms of knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and beliefs. Innovations include: age- appropriate, high-interest, high impact, theory-driven videos; the use of a """"""""reality dimension"""""""" enhancement; the use of Social Action Theory to support and promote pro health changes; use of National Health Education Standards to ensure age-appropriate standards and performance indicators.
AIMS MEDIA INC. in Chatsworth, CA, one of the nation's largest marketers and distributors of video educational and training programs, will use their world-wide marketing systems in schools, hospitals, public libraries businesses and government agencies to ensure a wide distribution of this product.
