With the onset and rapid spread of COVID-19 without a safe and effective vaccine, initial efforts to reduce community spread focused on basic public health measures such as mask wearing, social distancing, hand-washing, avoiding large gatherings, and suspected cases isolation and quarantine. Following was the development of the COVID-19…

In this article, I provide a brief historical perspective on how state-level policy was an integral part of the rise of school physical education in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the evolution of sport pedagogy as a subdiscipline within the field of kinesiology. The role and importance of policy in changing behavior are…

Qualitative investigation can provide invaluable information towards understanding the influence of school nutrition education (NE). The study explored teachers' perceptions of the immediate impact of NE on learners' eating behaviours. Twenty-four primary school teachers in the Bronkhorstspruit district, Gauteng, South Africa, who taught nutrition…

This article provides a theory-based, step-by-step approach to intervention development and illustrates its application in India to design an intervention to promote tobacco-use cessation among school personnel in Bihar. We employed a five-step approach to develop the intervention using the Social Contextual Model of Health Behavior Change (SCM)…

Positive health behaviors can be learned by observing the behavior of others and its consequences for them. Four processes--attention, retention, motor performance, and motivation--can be used by teachers to increase the effectiveness of modeling. (DF)

This 1963 paper explains that physicians must help balance their patients' desire to live a pleasurable life with their desire to be healthy, noting that if they insist upon only health-promoting behaviors, their patients will view them as being "warriors against pleasure" and may not follow their advice. (SM)

Arguments based on the philosophies of natural law, utilitarianism, paternalism, and distributive justice are examined for their pertinence to health behavior change strategies. Health educators should prepare individuals to make health-generating decisions but may need to limit the conditions under which they intervene. (Author/PP)