School health performance score: a comparative study between rural and urban school performance

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONEducation is a best indicator for lifelong health with improved quality of life. Those with more years of schooling tend to have better health, well-being and healthier behaviors. Education is an important mechanism for enhancing health and well-being of individuals as it reduces the need for health care, associated costs of dependence, lost earnings and human suffering. It also helps promote and sustain healthy lifestyles and positive choices, supporting and nurturing human development, human relationships as well as personal, family and community well-being. 1,2Safe, secure and healthy environment for children to learn better and face the challenges of future life can be achieved by school sanitation and hygiene education. In India, more than one fifth of our child population of 5-14 years of age usually opts for primary and secondary education. The number of children enrolled in schools are 80% whereas the rest remaining out of school. Out of the enrolled children, 65-85% is regularly attending school, on an average 200 days (54.79%) in a year. Thus, majority of the time is spent in school. School health is a social concern in different populations, places, and time. Investigators suggest that education causes health; however, the pathways through which education leads to better health and longer life expectancy are still not clearly understood. We know that education, health, and social outcomes are very closely interdependent. Success in school and years of schooling are major factors in determining social and occupational status in adulthood and health status throughout life. 4 ABSTRACT Background: Safe, secure and healthy environment for children to learn better and face the challenges of future life can be achieved by school sanitation and hygiene education. The objective of the study was to study School health performance score and compare between rural and urban school performance. Methods: A cross sectional study was carried out. It included randomly selected 46 rural schools and 11 urban schools. Both the school was compared in terms of school health services parameters. Results: In our study, 33854 students in total were enrolled from 46 rural schools as compared 9904 students from 11 urban schools. Mean number of students per school was noted to be 735.95±303.72 in rural schools and 900.36±172.83 students in urban schools. From the 46 rural school teachers, 7 teachers had semi-English as their mode of teaching as compared to 39 teachers whose mode of teaching was Marathi; while all the 11 urban school teachers taught their students only in Marathi. Conclusions: It was found that the school performance score overall as well as on individual item studies was significantly better in urban schools than the rural schools.

Assessing Competences of Geography Students Acquired through the Competence-based Teaching and Learning Approach in Rwandan Secondary Schools

“…These results agree with previous studies which indicated that students from rural schools performed better compared with their counterparts from urban schools (Nidup, 2022;Oyeromi, et al, 2018). At the same time, the results contradict other studies which revealed that urban schools performed better than rural schools (Sumida & Kawata, 2021;Vishwajeet & Girish, 2018). This implies that the performance of students in both rural and urban schools may be context specific, likely related to the availability of teaching resources.…”

“…Different studies confirm that secondary school students in Africa perform poorly in geography (Anlimachie, 2019;Eze, 2021;Mwesiga, 2017;Opoku, et al, 2020;Yahaya, et al, 2021). By comparing rural and urban schools, some studies found that students from rural schools perform better compared with their counterparts from urban schools (Nidup, 2022;Oyeromi, et al, 2018;) and this contradicted by others revealing that urban schools perform better than rural schools (Opoku-Asare & Siaw, 2015; Sumida & Kawata, 2021;Vishwajeet & Girish, 2018).…”

Monitoring the health environment in Ukrainian primary schools

“…Good monitoring and evaluation ensures adequate and optimal implementation of school health services (Chidiebere et al, 2016). Scientists from various fields consider the problem of the creation of a safe health education environment for primary schools and monitoring its effectiveness: monitoring the medical (Calmeiro, 2019;Jourdan et al, 2018;Wahl, 2017) and sanitary (Chavan & Chavan, 2018;Madureira et al, 2015) provision of the educational environment; monitoring of school physical activity policies (Jordán, et al, 2017;Kohl et al, 2012;Taylor et al, 2011); remote health monitoring technologies (Toscos, Connelly, & Rogers, 2012) programs to measure the child's holistic development (Seema, 2019); monitoring as a primary information system in education (Lunyachek, 2011) etc.…”