School: College Place Middle School
City: Lynwood, WA
Grades: 7-8 (General Science)

Principle Investigator: Roger Roffman, DSW
Department: Innovative Programs Research Group, School of Social Work
Institution: University of Washington

Project Description
The Teen Marijuana Check-Up (TMCU) was designed as a voluntary intervention program for non-treatment seeking adolescents. The goal of this project is to assess the efficacy of a personalized feedback condition in reducing marijuana use among teens. The researchers hope to observe reductions in marijuana use, increased enrollment in treatment, and changes in symptoms of abuse and treatment.

The third stage of the TMCU, which is currently in progress, is making many changes from the first two. The change that I am involved in is the addition of an "Educational Condition." The goals of this condition are to provide a comparison condition that will serve as a control, model existing school-based interventions, and provide useful information to a teen who is currently using marijuana.

The Education Condition is planned to contain at least one brief film clip, a PowerPoint presentation on marijuana that presents current marijuana research and issues, and a collection of marijuana resources for the adolescent.

At the time that I parted ways with the IPRG group, the "EdCon" as we affectionately referred to it, was in the final revision stages and set to be piloted within the following month. The TMCU3 is set to be implemented in 6 local high schools over the next couple of years.

Working in the Roffman lab has provided me with a great understanding of how much painstaking effort has to go into research with human subjects. I hope to take the skills I have gained, such as translating scientific results and studies into age-appropriate descriptions, into my future classrooms in an effort to integrate science into "real-world" applications.

Acknowledgements
Special thanks to everyone at IPRG, especially Roger, Denise, Blinda, Jen, and Gretchen.