Teaching sessions
Because the main objective of this study was to determine whether educating adolescents about air pollution in the form of a single teaching session would result in behavioral changes that are environmentally friendly, we chose a one-hour in-person teaching session about air pollution by researchers as the intervention. For the control group, we chose to provide an in-person teaching session by researchers about another topic other than air pollution (vaccination). This allowed us to test the hypothesis that what the researchers taught (versus the researchers’ presence) will affect the adolescents’ future behavior.The teaching sessions were one hour in duration, script-based, and associated with a PowerPoint slide presentation (The participating students were separated into two groups according to their group assignments and placed into two different classrooms. The assigned teaching sessions were administered by the study staff to each group.