Knowledge of Alzheimer’s Disease among College Students: Results from the Intergenerational Connections Project

Overview: This paper investigated whether college students improved their knowledge of ADRD after participating in an intergenerational connections project. Results showed that college students improved their knowledge of ADRD in the total sum scores as well as four specific items of ADKS after participating the study.Proposal text:

Objective: Given the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) in the United States, there is an urgent need for education and information about the disease for formal and informal caregivers of persons with ADRD. Research suggests that Millennial caregivers, some of whom are in college, are increasingly assisting a family member with ADRD (Vega et al., 2017) or will do so in the future. Thus, educating young adults about ADRD is critically important. To improve college students’ knowledge of ADRD, an intergenerational intervention was conducted to connect young adult college students with community dwelling older adults with ADRD. College students were trained to make weekly phone calls to Meals on Wheels clients (age 65+), once a week for ten weeks (40-60 minutes each week). This paper investigated whether college students improved their knowledge of ADRD after participating in this project.

Method: College students aged 18-30 from a public university in North Texas were recruited. Forty-one students completed the entire intervention. Participants completed surveys through QuestionPro at baseline, in the middle and at the end of the study. The Alzheimer's Disease Knowledge Scale (ADKS) was used to measure students’ knowledge of ADRD. The nonparametric Wilcox signed-rank test was used for analysis of each item, which is equivalent to the dependent t-test but does not assume normality in the data. Post hoc between group significance tests were also conducted to see if the significant changes occurred between pre- and mid- tests, mid- and post- tests, as well as pre- and post- tests at p