DEVELOPING AND TESTING A QUESTIONNAIRE TO MEASURE FOOD LITERACY IN UPPER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

Approaches to child and adolescent food education have broadened out from the traditional focus on nutrition knowledge to helping children cultivate a positive relationship with food through enjoyable hands-on experiences with gardening and cooking. Evaluating the impact of these programs is challenging, however, due to the complex interrelated factors that contribute to food choices. The emerging and evolving construct of food literacy offers an opportunity to better understand the scope of program impact, as itencompasses the dynamic relationships between food, health, and socio-environmental contexts. To date, defining and measuring food literacy has focused primarily on adults, and toadequately measure this construct in children, tools are needed that are based on developmentally-appropriate dimensions and competencies.The overarching goal of this project is to develop a food literacy assessment instrument that captures how upper elementary school children engage with and navigate their food context and understand broader food and agricultural systems to inform the planning, implementation, and evaluation of food education programs. The specific research objectives for the project are to: 1)Develop and test a questionnaire to measure food literacy in upper elementary school children based on a child and adolescent-focused conceptual definition and measurement framework,and 2)Conduct exploratory analyses to investigate the relationships betweenfood literacy, food education, and children's fruit and vegetable intake.