Developmentally-based AIDS/HIV education.

ABSTRACT

PIP: A growing number of health and education professional argue that AIDS/HIV education curricula should be developmentally-based. They suggest the principles of developmental psychology be use to design curricula based on the sequentially ordered ways children of different ages understand AIDS. Relying on findings of research on development of children's conceptions of illness, a specific developmentally-based approach to educating school-age children about AIDS/HIV is presented in this paper. For each of the 3 major age groups (young, intermediate, and older), the paper describes general characteristics for children's though processes, ways in which children assimilate information about various aspects of AIDs, and implications for educating children about causes, prevention, and fear of AIDS. With maturity, though processes change from an egocentric viewpoint of self to an integration of self and others, from focusing only on external events to distinguishing between external and internal domains, from the inability to differentiate between cause and effect to complex causal reasoning, and from absolute thinking to relativistic thinking. These characteristics are evident in their knowledge about AIDS. While younger children define AIDS on terms of an external event and cannot articulate a cause for AIDS, children at the intermediate age level define AIDS by specific symptoms, attribute its cause to an external agent, and perceive AIDS as occurring in more general groups of people. Older children define a specific illness as a syndrome, perceive the causes of AIDS to include sex and drugs, and have a more complex understanding of the consequences of AIDs. The focus of AIDS/HIV education can move from reducing fear in the younger group thought reassurance from authority figures about their nonvulnerability, to identifying and differentiating causes and noncauses of AIDS in the intermediate groups by providing them with a list of noncauses, and to articulate strategies for AIDS prevention in the older group through detailed explanations of modes of transmission and prevention behavior. (author's modified).