Assignment Task

Assessment Purpose

Nutritionists often work in health promotion and public health contexts, in roles such as health promotion officers, project coordinators, public health nutritionists, community nutritionists, and nutrition educators. These roles can be found across local councils, non-government health agencies, community organizations, and social support agencies.

Part of the role of Nutritionists is to equip community members with the information and tools they need to eat well, engaging with community members in what ‘eating well’ means to them, what they need, and what is important to them.

This task will ask you to thoughtfully design a nutrition education program for a priority community group and use the Program Management Cycle to inform the needs assessment and planning, implementation, and evaluation of the nutrition education program. The nutrition education program will be designed utilizing adult learning principles and learning design principles.

As you will learn, the Program Management Cycle is a great tool to facilitate thorough planning, implementation, and evaluation of many different kinds of Health Promotion and Public Health Nutrition projects. In this context, we are using it specifically in the context of Nutrition Education, however, this tool you may find useful in the future in broader health promotion and public health nutrition work.

Subject Intended Learning Outcomes (SILOs)

This assessment task addresses all three of the SILOs for this unit. Upon successful completion of this subject, you should be able to:

1. Apply learning and educational theories to design individual and group nutrition education sessions, including development of appropriate supporting materials.
2. Apply effective individual and group multimodal communication skills for a range of purposes.
3. Review and analyze the food, health, and nutritional status of groups across Australia and the world.

Assessment Context

You are a Nutritionist working in a local non-government health promotion agency. Your agency is wanting to engage directly with local community groups who have been identified as priority communities due to their social and health needs. In recent months, the agency has worked to engage with local community leaders and started a Felt Needs Assessment with some specific community groups. The community groups below have specifically identified some food and nutrition concerns that they would like a nutritionist to work with them about.

Assessment Task

The steps to complete this assessment task are outlined below (the components of the Program Management Cycle are in bold font):

1. Choose one of the three Community Groups that you will focus your work on.
2. Prepare a Program Portfolio, including:

• Complete a needs assessment (normative and felt need) to identify the nutrition needs and priorities of the group, using information from peer-reviewed literature, grey literature, and the felt needs you can identify in the descriptions above.
• Plan your nutrition education program:
  • Write your goal and 2-4 SMART objectives for this program.
  • Determine your strategy/ies.
  • Design detailed session plans for each of the 4 sessions, including 1 or more Intended Learning Outcome (ILO).
  • Outline of topics, discussions, activities, and time allowed for each.
  • Ensure you apply principles of adult learning and learning design throughout your program.
  • Ensure you consider and plan for ‘how’ and ‘why’ your group may enjoy learning, not just ‘what’ you think they need to learn.
  • Identify 2 existing written or video nutrition education/information resources that suit your objectives and clearly incorporate them into relevant sessions. Include these resources in the appendix with a brief 1-2 sentence rationale for their use.
  • Create a written educational resource tailored specifically for your audience and their needs, and clearly incorporate it into a relevant session. Include this resource in your appendix with a brief 1-2 sentence rationale for your intended use.
  • Ensure your written resource utilizes adult learning and effective communication principles.
  • Plan and describe the evaluation plan of the program, including planning how to evaluate your strategies and your objectives. Reconsider your session plans and include practical evaluation plans in the session plan, as well as practical follow up. It is not expected for you to evaluate the goal as this is not usually practically feasible. It is not expected for you to write questionnaires or surveys. The thoroughness of the evaluation plan is in being able to describe ‘how’ the program will be evaluated thoroughly.

3. Prepare to Implement your nutrition program (note important instructions below).
4. Write a self-reflection about your experience, insights, challenges, and joys of completing this. Especially consider what you have learned about teaching or sharing information and translating nutrition science for community members. Use the reflective practice template provided, which utilizes the Gibbs Cycle of reflective practice.