Youth Responses to a Sex Trafficking Education Curriculum

Background and Purpose: US DoE recommends that schools include curriculums to promote students' awareness of sex trafficking to enhance prevention and response. Although many programs have been developed focusing on this, few have been evaluated for effectiveness. To address this gap, we conducted a feasibility evaluation of Teach2Reach, a seven-lesson program about healthy relationships and sex trafficking. One component of the program and evaluation is collection of students' exit tickets. Exit tickets are comments written by the students after each program session that provide feedback to the teacher about students' perceptions of program information. Our research asks: Is it feasible to collect such information from youth?; What do youth report learning?; and What questions do youth have after completing various sections of programming?

Methods: Eight alternative schools served as study sites. Teachers providing Teach2Reach programming collected exit tickets from students after each lesson. Students were asked to write about: something they learned; questions they have; or something that stood out from the lesson. Teachers submitted deidentified exit tickets to the researchers after curriculum completion. Two coders reviewed tickets in a multi-step, iterative process, examining them qualitatively using content analysis and grounded theory. Exit tickets were analyzed in groups related to the content of the programming: Healthy Relationships (focus of two lessons); Sex Trafficking (focus of three lessons); and Finding Help (focus of two lessons). Then, tickets were assigned major codes if they contained content (e.g., “Sex trafficking: online safety”), questions, reflections (e.g., “I should speak up more”) and/or general information (e.g., “everything stood out”). Subcodes were also created using themes derived from the tickets (e.g., “Where/how to find help”). Multiple codes could be applied to each ticket since students often wrote several thoughts on one ticket.

Results: Five (63%) schools returned exit tickets, with a total of 348 tickets collected. 329 tickets were legible and could be analyzed. Of these, 155 (47%) focused on sex trafficking, 112 (34%) focused on healthy relationships, and 92 (28%) focused on finding help. Analysis showed that most students understood the main points presented in the program. Moreover, students often had further questions about program content (36 about sex trafficking, 24 about healthy relationships, and 28 about finding help). Only 7 students (2%) indicated that they had no takeaways from the lessons.

Conclusions and Implications: Although it is uncommon for data to be obtained from the students in the initial implementation of sex trafficking prevention programs, it is important to garner feedback from the target audience. This research found that it is feasible to collect information about sex trafficking programs directly from youth, that youth typically demonstrate that they have learned the major themes presented in the program, but that youth often have additional questions after completing various sections of programming. While some schools did not return any tickets and there were other reasons for missing tickets, the tickets that were returned provided initial evidence that youth were engaged with the content and retaining knowledge and offer future directions to improve course curriculum.