Effects of a short school-based vaping prevention program for high school students

Educational programs that address adolescents’ misperceptions of e-cigarette harms and benefits and increase refusal skills play an important role in preventing initiation and use. This study evaluates changes in adolescents’ e-cigarette perceptions, knowledge, refusal skills, and intentions to use following a real-world implementation of a school-based vaping-prevention curriculum. Study participants were 357 9th-12th grade students from one high school in Kentucky, United States who participated in a 60-minute vaping prevention curriculum from the Stanford REACH Lab’s Tobacco Prevention Toolkit. Participants completed pre- and post-program assessments regarding their e-cigarette knowledge, perceptions, refusal skills, and intentions to use e-cigarettes. Matched paired t-tests and McNemar tests of paired proportions were applied to assess changes in study outcomes. Following the curriculum, participants indicated statistically significant changes on all 15 survey items related to e-cigarette perceptions (p’s