Cancer Awareness Changes After an Educational Intervention Among Undergraduate Students

The objectives of this study are to assess undergraduate awareness of cancer risk factors, prevention strategies, and warning signs and to evaluate whether an educational intervention increases cancer awareness. This study adopts a nonequivalent control group pretest–posttest design. Of the 386 students who completed the pretest, only 35–39 % identified low fruit and vegetable intake, being overweight, and physical inactivity as cancer risk factors, and <30 % recognized persistent changes in bowel or bladder habits and persistent cough or hoarseness as cancer warning signs. After the educational intervention, the analysis of variance of changes from baseline (the pretest score) for all four experimental groups were all significantly higher than those of the two control groups (p ≤ .001), except for the change of the retention test score from the pretest score for experimental group 3. This study highlights the need to improve undergraduates' cancer awareness and the effectiveness of educational intervention.