The impact of college‐level sex education on sexual knowledge, attitudes, and practices: The knowledge/sexual experimentation myth revisited

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Abstract
In recent years, many persons have opposed sex education believing that such courses will lead to increased participation in sexual intercourse by young people, but their fears are not supported by most previous research. The influence of sex education material integrated into functional marriage and family courses, however, has not been the subject of in‐depth, scientific investigations. An anonymous questionnaire was administered to never‐married undergraduate students enrolled in a college‐level marriage and family course at a state university. A pretest and post‐test design was utilized with experimental groups of 50 women and 26 men and comparison groups of 60 women and 28 men. The findings indicate that the sex education content had a significant impact on the experimental groups, especially for women. Substantial increases in knowledge regarding abortion and contraception, more favorable attitudes toward masturbation, and frequency of masturbation were reported by experimental group women as contrasted with comparison group women. Experimental group men indicated increased knowledge about female hygiene and contraception in contrast to comparison group men. From these findings, sex educators should be able to better meet the criticisms of sex education opponents given this greater understanding of the impact of sex education material on the sex lives of their students.