• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.101-106
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• 2017

Based on the previous reports that majority of teachers have negative perceptions on food additives, a teacher training program called 'Let's teach food additives correctly' was developed and applied to improve teachers' unbalanced perception on food additives and let them teach students with sound scientific background. The 15-hours training program consisted of understanding of food safety and food additives, education materials on food additives, development of teaching-learning plan, meeting with professionals from Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS), visiting MFDS labs, application to school class, and evaluation. A total of 63 teachers participated in the training through 2 sessions conducted in August 2016. As a result, teachers showed high satisfaction rates (4.2~4.5 in 5.0-Likert scale) and 91.5% answered the training helpful for the school class. Although their initial intention to participate the training was to know the details of negative intake effects of food additives, their such perception was totally changed in addition, they suggested a continuous training for teachers and immediate correction of incorrect information in school textbooks. Also, post-training education for 1,172 students by these teachers appeared to improve the understanding of and the native perceptions on food additives significantly (p < 0.001). Above results showed that the training program could solve the problem of transmitting unbalanced information on food additives to students by training teachers, and such channel could be used to facilitate food-related risk communication.