| dc.description.abstract | During disaster events, people react depending on how they perceive a hazard or risk. An often-omitted impact of disasters is how children experience disasters and respond in their aftermath, including changes in risk perception. The curriculum in secondary schools does not typically cover local natural hazards or their impacts in sufficient depth. This thesis presents a formal, online, and youth-centric natural hazard and disaster educational program, specific to Texas. However, working with children in research is difficult as our Houston Independent School District (ISD) collaborators required a vetted program before testing it on a vulnerable population (children); therefore, a proxy community was utilized. By using local college students as proxies for high school adolescents in a pilot study, this research investigates how the curriculum impacts subject matter proficiency and risk perceptions. Results suggest that the developed curriculum content and surveys effectively improve natural hazards subject matter proficiency in participants. The curriculum also influences risk perception; participants who ended the program with higher module scores were found also to have higher risk perception, post-curriculum. Although some hazards were perceived as more likely to directly impact participants than others, specific hazard fears were decreased in general.
Our findings demonstrate how exposure to an educational program can also increase hazard awareness and coping capacity. This study contributes to natural hazard and disaster risk perception literature concerning young adults. The integration of an online natural hazards education curriculum into studying risk perception of children or young adults has not yet been attempted. This work also serves as a pilot study for developing an interactive online curriculum at a high school-level for local community partners that have been affected by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas. The curriculum is currently accessible to the 11th grade level on average on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level test and compatible with any learning management system, thus enabling future research with children. | |
