This book helps educators produce assessments of their schools' drug and violence prevention programs. It contains over 30 separate resources that can be adapted to specific evaluations (e.g., sample youth and adult participant feedback sheets, sample classroom observation sheets and teacher implementation logs, sample en-route participant feedback, sample teacher surveys of curriculum content, data summary logs, sample student risk surveys, and sample parent consent forms). There are also guidelines, glossaries, and advice on online funding. The 12 chapters are: (1) "Getting Started: Establishing Your Work Group"; (2) "Writing Goals and Objectives"; (3) "Program Review, Selection, and Implementation"; (4) "Creating Homegrown Programs: Elements of Effective Prevention"; (5)"Additional Data Collection: Preparing for Assessment of Program Effectiveness"; (6) "Self-Report Questionnaires and Focus Groups: Collecting Information From Students"; (7) "Cost and Time Effectiveness"; (8) "Experimental Design: The Basics"; (9) "Experimental Designs for Different Program Types"; (10) "Crunching Your Numbers and Organizing Your Data"; (11) "Public Presentation of Your Results"; and (12) "Troubleshooting Your Results." (Contains 29 references.) (SM)

Youth substance use and misuse are still highly common, despite substantial efforts made to reduce the problem. Early start with substance use is often associated with more severe short- and long-term negative consequences for youth psycho-social adjustment. Bringing together international experts in the areas of prevention, health, and developmental science, this volume presents the most up-to-date knowledge about etiology (e.g., risk and protective factors) of substance use behaviors and the most effective interventions that can be implemented in the school setting. It also presents current hot topics in the field, such as: The importance of implementation fidelity for the success of the program The need to find effective ways to disseminate evidence based interventions and to understand whether those interventions are, in fact, cost effective. Taken together, these articles shed a light on what has been done and what still needs to be done to combat substance use among youth and suggest new theoretical perspectives and new practical approaches to address the problem. This is the 141st volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

A recent report from the United States Surgeon General shows that some school-based tobacco use prevention programmes have proved successful in discouraging first use of tobacco among children. Dissemination of these programmes, however, has been minimal. Taking a health researcher's perspective, the authors of this volume discuss the history, status and needs of school-based tobacco use prevention//cessation research. Issues addressed include how to implement such programmes and the major theoretical and methodological issues involved. Details of the Project Toward No Tobacco Use (TNT) are also covered.

As the nation's drug crisis has deepened, public and private agencies have invested huge sums of money in prevention efforts. Are the resulting programs effective? What do we need to know to make them more effective? This book provides a comprehensive overview on what we know about drug abuse prevention and its effectiveness, including: Results of a wide range of antidrug efforts. The role and effectiveness of mass media in preventing drug use. A profile of the drug problem, including a look at drug use by different population groups. A review of three major schools of prevention theory-risk factor reduction, developmental change, and social influence. An examination of promising prevention techniques from other areas of health and human services. This volume offers provocative findings on the connection between low self-esteem and drug use, the role of schools, the reality of changing drug use in the population, and more. Preventing Drug Abuse will be indispensable to anyone involved in the search for solutions, including policymakers, anti-drug program developers and administrators, and researchers.

"This publication does not offer a pre-packaged programme of education for drug abuse prevention that can be picked up and implemented. It is rather an attempt to provide a conceptual basis upon which teachers, policy makers and school administrators can make decisions about school based drug prevention programmes in order to achieve greater success in education terms" -- p. 6.