Browsing by Subject "terveysosaaminen"

Goals. According to Finnish curriculum (2014) the environmental science includes five subjects in primary school: biology, geography, physics, chemistry and health education. The purpose of this study was to examine the primary school teachers' self-efficacy and capacity to teach health education in primary school. The purpose was also to examine teachers' views and experiences about health educations' importance in primary school. In this thesis the self-efficacy is based on Albert Banduras self-efficacy theory (1997) and health education competence includes teachers subject expertise, exploratory grip, health literacy and the diversity of teaching methods. This study investigated the relations of teachers' self-efficacy and health education capacities. In this thesis teachers' views and experiences about their capability and likeness to teach health education were also examined. Methods. The data were collected in March 2017. The method for collecting the data was an electronic survey. 31 classroom teachers from Helsinki, Tuusula, Nurmijärvi, Hyvinkää and Jokioinen participated in this thesis. The study was executed with mixed methods, partly quantitative and partly qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis included correlation of self-efficacy and health education capacities. Crosstabulation was used to examine dependency of gender, work experience and competence to teach health education. Qualitative analysis was executed by phenomenographic analysis and considered teachers' views and experiences about the importance of health education, health literacy as well as their self-evaluated capacity to teach health education in primary school. Results and conclusions. Despite the primary school teachers' slight health education training, the results show that teachers' were fairly health-concious. Self-efficacy correlated especially with subject expertise and health literacy. Teachers' experienced the health education as important subject in primary school and themselves fairly competent to teach health education in primary school.