Findings From an Evaluation of the El Camino Sexual Health Program

To evaluate El Camino, Child Trends partnered with Identity, Inc. to implement El Camino during lunch, elective classes, or after school at 11 high schools in Maryland with large Latino populations. Researchers at the University of Maryland evaluated El Camino’s effectiveness: classrooms at each school were randomly selected to receive either El Camino or an alternative life skills program. This resource summarizes the demographic characteristics of student participants, their perceptions of the program, and pre- and post-test findings that highlight the need for sexual health education and the positive impacts of El Camino.

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Demographics and background of students participating in the evaluation

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Students’ pre-program survey responses highlight the need for sexual health and positive youth development curricula.

Many students reported mental health struggles in the past 30 days.

Mental health at baseline

Percent of students who reported feeling each emotion some of the time, most of the time, or all of the time in the past 30 days

A quarter of students had had penis-vagina sex by the start of the program, and more than half of sexually active students reported having unprotected sex.

• 26 percent of students reported in the pre-program survey that they had had penis-vagina sex.
• 53 percent of sexually active students had sex without any contraceptive method (including condoms) in the 3 months before the pre-program survey.

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Students who participated in El Camino had greater improvements in knowledge, self-efficacy, intentions, and attitudes from pre-test to post-test than students in the control group.

Note: Findings based on 289 students who received El Camino and completed both the baseline and post-test surveys. For all findings shown here, improvements from pre-test to post-test were significantly higher for the El Camino group than the control group based on multivariate impact analyses.

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Students rated El Camino highly at post-test.

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This publication was made possible with grant funding from the HHS Office of Population Affairs, Phase 2 Rigorous Evaluation of Promising TPP Interventions (TPP20 Tier 2 Phase 2) – 2020-2023 (FAIN# TP2AH000077). Contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Department of Health and Human Services nor the Office of Population Affairs.

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