Evaluating Prevention in Your Setting

How well even a proven prevention program works in a given setting depends largely on:

Changing community & social influences: Over history, different drugs have meant different things to different groups. Once seen as the cure for morphine addiction, heroin now carries its own addictive label in society. Similarly, changing acceptance of alcohol and even laws surrounding marijuana result in more youths being around others who imbibe, a social influence we now know plays a major role in the initiation and early stages of drug use (Salvy, Pedersen et al. 2014). This suggests that to be effective, prevention programs targeting children and adolescents must influence social factors. (Botvin 1996, Hawkins, Van Horn et al. 2004) To influence them, social factors must be tracked and understood.

Program fidelity: The degree to which teachers and other program providers implement programs as intended by the program developers is called fidelity of implementation and is important to results (Dusenbury, Brannigan et al. 2003).The Friends of Narconon Video Program is based on a series of DVDs and codified, interactive components developed over decades of working with schools and groups. We encourage you to schedule the entire series.

Monitor these factors by obtaining both student responses and facilitator feedback. Doing so will provide you with tools and feedback for quality assurance /quality control. We also encourage you to send us your feedback and anonymous student responses. Your feedback helps.

Student and Classroom Evaluations: This curriculum contains two types of anonymous student survey forms as well as periodic Review Quizzes.Administer the Short Student Surveys before, immediately on completion, and again in 6 months to evaluate key attitudes and perceptions of risk regarding alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. A set of forms and a checklist to help you use them are included in your curriculum materials and may be downloaded using these links.

How to Administer the Evaluation Surveys – Checklist Pre-curriculum Student Survey Post-curriculum Student Survey 6-month follow-up Student Survey (optional)

Mail these to Friends of Narconon upon completion of the curriculum. Friends of Narconon tabulates these for quality management. Since inception, over 80% of student feedback is positive. A high number of negative surveys triggers a call by the School Program Director to evaluate and help address any program delivery questions.

Use the Student Review Quizzes included in the curriculum kit to gauge student comprehension during delivery. If many students miss a particular concept, this is seen on the quizzes and can be addressed during built-in curriculum sessions that review core materials. If you need additional support, call our toll-free number 1-800-882-6862.

Facilitator Feedback Survey: Your continued feedback plays no small part in remaining current and being able to address the changing face of drug use among our youths. As technologies change and also external pressures change—new drugs are synthesized and/or laws and social risk perceptions change. By returning these surveys you help us remain abreast of what is practical for a classroom and any changes that would improve the curriculum or its ability to be delivered well.  Use the the Facilitator Feedback Survey as a checklist when doing each session and program step. When complete, return it to us with your feedback. We want to know what worked and if there are issues or concerns the FON School Program Director may follow up by phone. We use this feedback to periodically update the Educators’ Guide.