Breast Cancer and Self-Examination Knowledge After Education Among Female Boarding-School Students

Abstract

Introduction: Breast cancer remains a major women’s health burden, and health promotion for early detection is a core component of contemporary breast cancer control. Adolescence provides an opportunity to establish breast-health literacy before adulthood, yet evidence on focused breast-health education in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools remains limited.

Objective: To compare overall breast cancer and BSE knowledge immediately before and after education among female adolescents at an Islamic boarding school.

Method: Sixty-five female adolescents with complete paired data took part in a pre-experimental, one-group pretest-posttest study. A 15-item true/false questionnaire spanning breast cancer, its risk factors, warning signs, early detection, and BSE was used to gauge knowledge, and raw scores were converted into percentages. Normality of the pretest-posttest difference scores was checked with the Shapiro-Wilk test, after which paired pretest and posttest scores were compared through the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

Result: Mean knowledge increased from 86.15 ± 9.45 to 95.49 ± 6.47; median scores increased from 86.67 to 100.00 (Wilcoxon p<0.001). The reported Wilcoxon statistic requires verification of its software definition.

Conclusion: Knowledge scores increased immediately following a single educational session. Without a comparison group or follow-up, causal improvement, durable retention, and BSE practice cannot be inferred.