Abstract:

Posters represent traditional teaching aids that are used in education around the world. Their main functions are educational, aesthetic and motivational. However, do posters have the expected educational effect at the current time when children are affected by a large amount of information and their perception is determined by digital technologies? The aim of the paper is to present the results of research aimed at the educational effectiveness of posters placed in common areas of schools.

The main method of quantitative research was a natural pedagogical experiment, where the independent variable was the application of the created posters, the dependent variable was the level of knowledge, the indicator of knowledge was the number of points achieved in didactic tests. The technique of one group before-after was chosen. The sample was approximately 1000 secondary school pupils (aged 10 to 15) from ten elementary schools in the Czech Republic. Prior to experimental manipulation of the independent variable, the level of knowledge was measured by input didactic tests. This was followed by the application of three different posters with technically focused content in the common areas of the schools (i. e. outside the classroom) for a period of one year. The measure of the educational effectiveness of the posters was the level of pupils' knowledge at the end of the experiment measured by the output didactic tests in comparison with the level of pupils' knowledge measured by the input tests.

Based on the research, it is possible to state that the highest increase in knowledge was indicated after a year of application of the poster in the common areas of schools with the least amount of information content. For a poster with more information concentrated in more extensive text fields, no statistically significant difference was indicated between the level of knowledge before and after the one-year experiment (using the Wilcoxon test with a significance level of 0.05). Research has shown that even today, when children's attention is extensively influenced by digital media, posters placed in common areas of schools fulfill an educational function, but in order to make optimal use of their educational potential, it is necessary to choose their design carefully.

Keywords:

Educational Effectiveness, Elementary School, Knowledge, Poster, Research.