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National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion |
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HECAT users might have questions that arise as they begin the curriculum analysis process. Below are the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) with responses that follow.
The Health Education Curriculum Analysis Tool (HECAT) is an assessment tool for examining school health education curricula. The HECAT can help school districts conduct a clear, complete, and consistent analysis of health education curricula based on the National Health Education Standards and CDC’s Characteristics of Effective Health Education Curricula. The HECAT results can help schools select or develop appropriate and effective health education curricula and improve the delivery of health education. The HECAT is customizable to meet local community needs and conform to the curriculum requirements of the state or school district.
The purpose of the HECAT is to provide state, regional and local education agencies with a common set of tools to assist with the selection or development of health education curricula. The HECAT contains guidance, analysis tools, scoring rubrics, and resources for carrying out a clear, complete, and consistent examination of health education curricula. The HECAT results can help schools select or develop appropriate and effective health education curricula, strengthen the delivery of health education, and improve the ability of health educators to influence healthy behaviors and healthy outcomes among school-age youth. The HECAT is customizable to meet local community needs and conform to the curriculum requirements of the state or school district. These HECAT health topic modules are currently available:
Additional modules will be added as they are completed.
The HECAT is designed to be used by state, regional and local education agency staff and others responsible for selecting, supervising, developing or using health education curricula in schools. For example—
No. The review of curricula using the HECAT should be conducted by a team; an individual should not do it alone. A HECAT committee, working together, should complete the HECAT.
The HECAT includes all the needed guidance and appraisal tools for carrying out a thorough and systematic assessment of a health education curriculum. Information, materials, processes and tools are included in the chapters, appendices and glossary. The HECAT includes—
Using the HECAT can—
The HECAT can help ensure that your current health education curriculum selection or development process is systematic, consistent, and thorough, and reflects current research and practice, which will strengthen your own curriculum selection or development processes.
No. The HECAT is not required as a condition for receiving funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or any other federal agency. CDC developed the HECAT to help improve health education curriculum selection and development. Its use is entirely voluntary.
The HECAT was developed in response to requests from state education agencies and local school districts for a tool that would help them select or develop appropriate health education curriculum materials. The HECAT is limited to this specific purpose. CDC recognizes that high-quality health education also includes the following:
The School Health Index (SHI) is a school-level self-assessment and planning guide that addresses many of these aspects and will enable you to—
More information about the School Health Index is available on the School Health Index (SHI) Web site.
No. The HECAT does not assess research findings related to a particular curriculum’s effectiveness. Instead, it measures the extent to which a curriculum incorporates effective practices. The HECAT is based on CDC’s Characteristics of Effective Health Education Curricula and National Health Education Standards. However, the HECAT includes questions that ask whether or not the curriculum under review is included on federal lists that identify research-based, effective curricula.
Various federal agencies have identified youth-related programs considered to be worthy of recommendation based on a review of research evidence. A list of these federal agencies is included in Appendix 2 of the HECAT. Identification by these agencies should augment, not replace, your use of the HECAT to inform your health education curriculum decisions.
Pilot curriculum reviews using the HECAT have taken from 4 to 16 hours per curriculum. The time required for a curriculum review will depend on several factors:
The HECAT requires sufficient time to prepare for and complete the analysis. Typically, a curriculum review will not be completed in one session. Separate sessions might be necessary to prepare the review committee to use the HECAT, determine local performance benchmarks, shorten the list of curricula that might be acceptable for complete analysis, and conduct the complete analysis on the remaining curricula. You should also allow time for the curriculum review committee to review curriculum analysis scores and reach a consensus on curriculum recommendations. Chapter 1 of the HECAT provides guidance for coordinating and organizing your curriculum review and helps you determine the time you need to complete your curriculum review and selection process.
Yes. CDC recognizes that school curricula are typically selected at the local level and must meet local school and community needs and conform to state or school district curriculum requirements. You are encouraged to review the HECAT items before analyzing curricula and, if necessary, add, delete, or revise items to meet local needs and curriculum requirements. You can also shorten the HECAT. Ultimately, its length and content should reflect what you want to analyze. In making revisions, you should remember that the items included in the HECAT were developed through a rigorous process guided by research evidence and expert opinion on the types of information and learning experiences that help young people adopt and maintain health-enhancing behaviors. Revisions that significantly change the content or length of the HECAT could diminish the value the HECAT brings to your curriculum analysis, selection, or development process.
CDC is currently developing an interactive Web site that will allow you to customize the HECAT to meet local needs and curriculum requirements. When completed, this resource will be available at http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth.
It is not necessary, but all categories and items can be useful for selecting or developing a curriculum. You can determine which items in the HECAT are useful and important to include in your curriculum analysis and in the selection or development process. You also have the choice of determining how you want to use the HECAT items in your review process. For example, some curriculum review teams have used Chapter 2, General Curriculum Information to collect general descriptive information about the curriculum, developer and the year of development, topic areas, and grade levels, and Chapter 5, Curriculum Fundamentals, to appraise the learning objectives, teacher materials, curriculum design, instructional strategies and materials, promotion of norms that value positive health behaviors, and promotion of skills that reinforce positive health behaviors of a health education curriculum, to make initial decisions and shorten the list of curricula to be seriously considered. The remainder of the HECAT (i.e., Chapter 6, the Health Topic Modules to appraise specific health-topic curricula) is then used to review the curricula under serious consideration.
Yes, but it is not advisable. It is important to analyze curricula consistently to ensure fair curricula comparisons. This requires that you use the same scoring and comparison criteria for all curricula. We recommend that you first determine the items to be included in your analysis before you start the review process and, when reviewing multiple curricula, use the same items for the review of all curricula. If you make changes to the HECAT during the curriculum review process, you should re-review any curricula that were analyzed and scored prior to these changes.
No. But it is important that the most knowledgeable person(s) complete each section of the HECAT. The curriculum review team must have a broad range of expertise, and each of the team members should review only the HECAT components for which he or she is most qualified. For example, parents are invaluable in completing the Acceptability Analysis and, perhaps, less able to review the Skill Application. Chapter 1 in the HECAT provides a list of the persons who might be appropriate to serve on the curriculum review team and who have the expertise needed to complete some or all of the HECAT.
Even though it is not necessary for all curriculum review committee members to complete all sections of the HECAT, all members should receive the results of the entire HECAT analysis prior to making curriculum recommendations. Chapter 1 of the HECAT provides guidance for using the HECAT results to make curriculum recommendations.
Many possible resources are available to assist you with your health education and curriculum planning. First, contact the school health education consultant or coordinated school health program director in your state education or state health agency. Although the state consultant or director might not be able to assist you directly, he or she can refer or link you to state resource centers and other experts, including the following:
Many school health educators are members of national professional associations that represent school health educators, including the following:
The national officers in these organizations can help answer questions and link you to knowledgeable members who might be available to provide more direct assistance. You can direct your questions regarding health education or HECAT to CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health at the following e-mail address: cdcinfo@cdc.gov or phone 1-800-CDC-INFO. CDC/DASH grantees can contact their Project Officer to discuss how to best use the HECAT.
No. The curriculum review team also should include parents and other people from the community at-large. A suggested list of review committee members is provided in Chapter 1. All review team members should be stakeholders with an investment in the health and education needs and interests of the students in your school district or school.
No. It is often helpful to talk with the curriculum developers in order to thoroughly complete Chapter 2, General Curriculum Information. You might also want to invite them to showcase their curricular materials (e.g., scope and sequence, charts showing alignment with the National Health Education Standards) before you begin your review. However, curriculum developers should not be included in the analysis or scoring process, nor should they be allowed to unduly influence review committee members’ analyses. Most developers of commercially-packaged curriculum have a primary interest in marketing their products.
The topics used in the HECAT reflect the health issues that CDC considers to be important for children and adolescents. These topics may not match those used by other organizations or curriculum developers or the terminology used in your state, school district, or school. You should review the HECAT to find health topic modules that most complement your curriculum requirements and terminology. You can change the terminology and content of the modules to best meet your needs. If you do not find a match within a single module, it might be necessary to select items from multiple modules and design a new HECAT topic module to meet your needs.
CDC will be releasing additional topics as they are completed.
Yes. Some chapters and sections of the HECAT can be completed by one person, who then provides information to other review committee members. For example, Chapter 2, General Curriculum Information, captures general descriptive information needed to understand and review any health education curriculum and to make a final curriculum selection. One person who is very familiar with the curriculum, usually the curriculum coordinator, can complete the General Curriculum Information and provide the results to other review committee team members.
It is not advisable, however, to assign one person to review sections that would benefit from multiple perspectives and expertise. For example, acceptability of a curriculum typically varies within a community. It is critical that multiple reviewers complete the Acceptability Analysis together to ensure that the Acceptability Score reflects community perspectives, rather than only one individual’s point of view.
It is important to select review committee members who have the necessary expertise to complete the HECAT. Chapter 1 provides a list of persons who should be considered on your review committee for completing specific parts of the HECAT. For the Accuracy Analysis, for example, you should use persons who have research expertise (e.g., a university researcher), scientific expertise in the content area under review (e.g., a dietician for the topic “healthy eating”), and expertise in instructional delivery (e.g., a certified health educator or curriculum director). You should identify these experts prior to beginning the curriculum review. If desired, you can limit their assignments to cover only the parts of the HECAT for which they have expertise.
No. The HECAT provides concepts and skill examples deemed appropriate for grade groups (pre-K–2; 3–5; 6–8; 9–12). It does not identify the individual grade at which these might be most appropriate. State boards of education, local school boards, school district administrators, or curriculum coordinators determine curriculum priorities and curriculum requirements for all relevant health education topics, including the grades at which specific concepts and skills should be addressed. The HECAT can inform priorities and decisions about grade-level requirements. However, the HECAT is most useful in determining which commercially packaged curriculum best aligns with established requirements or what should be included in a locally developed curriculum to better meet these requirements. You also may rearrange the HECAT concepts and skill examples if their current placement does not match your local requirements.
A textbook is not typically considered a complete health education curriculum. The HECAT is designed to analyze an entire curriculum, including all the resources, such as textbooks that will be used with the curriculum. We do not recommend that you use the HECAT to analyze a single resource, such as a textbook, independent of the curriculum in which it will be used, because it will require a more extensive review than would normally be necessary for such a single resource.
We recognize that schools and school districts might use a separate review process to select a textbook that will become part of an existing health education curriculum. The HECAT can help you consider what to include in a separate textbook review process. Guidance for considering how the HECAT can be useful in the review of health education resource materials, such as a textbook, is provided in Appendix 3 [PDF 23K].
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Page last reviewed: July 18, 2008
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