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Vida Gudžinskienė Jūratė Česnavičienė

Abstract

Currently, institutions of general education are creating preconditions for every learner to acquire knowledge on healthy lifestyle, as well as to develop correspondent skills and habits. The aim of the present article is to define the knowledge, skills and habits of healthy lifestyle of 5-8th form learners by applying the Information-Motivation-Behavioural Skills model. The research aim is concretised by the following objectives: to define the Information-Motivation- Behavioural Skills model and to identify the knowledge on healthy lifestyle of 5-8th formers, as well as to reveal the subjective evaluation of health-promoting skills and habits.
Pursuing to answer the aforesaid tasks, analysis of scientific literature and empirical research, which included anonymous questionnaires for 5-8th formers of comprehensive schools (N=817: 48.7% of girls and 51.3% of boys), have been conducted. The data were processed applying the computer programme SPSS Statistics 16.0 for ‘Windows’. The following methods of mathematical-statistical analysis were applied for the analysis of the collected data: descriptive (percentage frequencies) and analytical (Pearson Chi-Square test) statistics.
The Information-Motivation-Behavioural Skills (IMB) model validates the combinability of information (as the initial and essential factor of the competence of health protection and promotion), personal and social motivation (as a second important factor), and skills and habits (as a third factor) in developing health protection and promotion competence at the junior stage of adolescence.
The empirical research reveals that the knowledge of more than one half of learners about health and healthy lifestyle may be defined as insufficient; whereas more than a half of research participants, i.e. 5-8th form learners, do not demonstrate firm skills of healthy lifestyle: they do not attach sufficient attention to their daily diet, physical activity, have harmful habits, whereas the knowledge on personal hygiene does not always comply with correspondent behaviour. Therefore, despite the fact that the development of learners’ competence of health protection and promotion complies with the Information-Motivation-Behavioural Skills model and creates preconditions for learners to develop positive changes in their behaviour in terms of healthy lifestyle, it is assumed that different learners need to determine only sufficient and some superficial knowledge on the issues of healthy lifestyle and condition insufficient development of health-promoting habits. It would be expedient for researchers to define the motivation of learners to acquire knowledge on healthy lifestyle and develop skills and behaviour changes in terms of the links between the acquired competences of health education and promotion.

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