Mammen JR, et al. - The efficacy of a developmentally sensitive curriculum for improving asthma self-management knowledge, attitude, and self-efficacy in adolescents was assessed. In inner-city adolescents, particularly females, developmentally appropriate training was effective in increasing critical self-management knowledge and self-efficacy.

• In a 12 h asthma self-management training program, 42 inner-city adolescents (ages 16–20) participated.
• The researchers measured self-management knowledge, attitude toward asthma, and asthma-related self-efficacy using short-answer tests before and after training.
• They used T-Tests to assess impact and calculated the effect sizes.

• In this study, mean pretest knowledge was 21.37/46 points; mean posttest was 36.33/46 points.
• With a large effect size (d=1.68), change from pre- to posttest was highly significant (t=10.34; p < .0001).
• The researchers found more improvement in females than males (18.66 ± 8.58 vs. 12.29 ± 8.13, p=0.039).
• They observed greatest effects in awareness of long-term consequences of uncontrolled asthma (d=2.04), ability to recognize symptoms of life-threatening asthma (d=1.61), correctly monitor symptoms (d=1.49), and tell if asthma was uncontrolled (d=1.39).
• Furthermore, asthma self-efficacy improved significantly (p=0.017), especially confidence in ability to correctly manage asthma.
• However, improvements in attitude did not achieve statistical significance.