Nudging for Behavior Change in School Cafeterias

Study Summary

The main purpose of this research is to look at a school lunchroom intervention that is known to improve fruit, vegetable, and milk consumption and see how it changes in the long run and if it affects the child's behavior permanently. The intervention will include the giving the vegetables descriptive names, moving the fruit to right next to the register and in attractive bowls, and increasing the amount of white milk served by 10%. The main forms of analyzing these results are through food preparation records, lunch sales records, and tray waste records. The first focus of this study is to see if there is a specific point in an intervention when improvement stops and therefore the intervention needs to be updated. This procedure involves looking at five similar middle schools with this same intervention over a 15 week period. The time of intervention implementation will vary by three week intervals, so the first will start the first week of school, the next school will start after three weeks of school, the next will start after six weeks of school, and the next will start after nine weeks of school, and the last will be a control school where there will be no intervention implementation. These intervals will help eliminate bias dealing with the beginning of the year excitement and seasonal effects. Food preparation records and lunch sales records will be collected from the school for the 15 week period. Tray waste will be recorded by having 200 randomly selected trays measured and collected twice a week over the 15 week period. This focus will help schools manage when they need to change their intervention so that improvements will not stop. The second focus of this study is to see if the children's improvement is kept when the intervention has stopped. This procedure will involve looking at a similar school to the other 5 schools. But unlike the other schools, this one will have the first 5 weeks without the intervention, then 5 weeks with the intervention, and t

Primary Outcome

To determine whether or not a student took a serving of fruit, we will rely on tray waste records that we collected twice a week (repeated measures) for the duration of the study. Based on these records, if a student selected a serving of fruit, she will receive a value of one. Otherwise, she will receive a value of zero. We will use this binary measure to estimate the proportion of students who took a serving of fruit.

Conditions Studied

Interventions

• BEHAVIORAL Basic School Lunchroom Nudges

Study Locations (6)