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May 30, 2005
A University of Illinois researcher has concluded that students who completed AlcoholEdu, an online Prevention program, reported 50 percent fewer health, social, and academic consequences from drinking. In addition, a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)-sponsored study on the interactive alcohol prevention program myStudentBody also revealed positive results on its effectiveness.
Under the AlcoholEdu program, students at American colleges who completed the online alcohol prevention program in 2003-2004 reported 50 percent fewer negative health, social, and academic consequences related to drinking than students who had not yet been exposed to the program, according to a new research study by Andrew F. Wall, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The study of 23,127 students is the first rigorous evaluation demonstrating the effectiveness of prevention in reducing the harm caused by college drinking.
"Many education-based solutions to the college drinking problem have been tried, but there has been little rigorous, multi-institutional research on their effectiveness," said Wall. "Our study set out to determine whether an online prevention program would change behavior and consequences."
"The results provide evidence for the first time that an interactive educational experience can substantially reduce the negative consequences of high-risk drinking," said Wall.
The study, which compared students who had completed AlcoholEdu to students who had not yet done so at four-week intervals during the academic year, is the largest ever evaluation of a college alcohol prevention program.
The finding of 50 percent fewer negative consequences included things such as:
- Missing class
- Attending class hungover
- Blacking out
- Having unprotected sex
- Vomiting in public
- Injuring yourself
- Performing poorly in athletics
According to Wall, AlcoholEdu's beneficial effect on negative consequences was documented throughout the academic year, regardless of when students completed the course.
AlcoholEdu, which is in use at over 450 colleges and universities nationwide, is a highly customized and personalized two and one-half hour online course from Outside The Classroom, Inc. It integrates a number of alcohol prevention strategies designed to help students make good decisions about alcohol.
There have been evaluation studies of other strategies to reduce high-risk college drinking, including environmental management programs and policy- or enforcement based initiatives. But Wall said his study was intended to be the first comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of a broad-based preventive education strategy.
"Our findings indicate that interactive education has persuasive evidence as a prevention strategy," said Wall. "And by linking specific outcomes to the educational techniques in AlcoholEdu, we can understand how education actually changes the behavior of the students who engage with it."
According to Dr. Richard P. Keeling, Vice President of Prevention Programs for Outside The Classroom, "We designed this program to function as a primary prevention effort for an entire population - something we call Population-Level Prevention. The program works because it is for everyone - not just high-risk drinkers, but abstainers and moderate drinkers alike. High-risk college drinking is a major public health issue and needs to be treated with population-level responses."
Prior to the completion of Wall's independent study, Outside The Classroom and the colleges and universities using the program had already produced a mounting body of evidence that AlcoholEdu was delivering measurable and positive results. "AlcoholEdu's consistent effectiveness has gotten the attention of major universities that have made it the cornerstone of their comprehensive prevention strategies," said Brandon Busteed, founder and chief executive of Outside The Classroom. "The program is the result of years of research, stringent evaluation, and feedback from hundreds of thousands of students."
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