The Future of Education

The purpose of this study was to develop an early childhood health education program utilizing multimedia as the means to promote health literacy which would be divided into health perception and behavior among 5 year-old children. The educational contents of this program consisted of four sub-factors of health: physical health, nutrition, mental health, and safety. This study adopted the Keller's model which consisted of four steps: attention, relevance, confidence, satisfaction(ARCS). This health education program was applied to 56 five-year-old children (the experiment group, 28; the comparison group, 28) with 26 sessions for 16 weeks from September 30 to December 22, 2010 in S kindergarten located in Seoul, Korea. First, it was found that the children's 'total' health perception score in post-test was higher at a statistically significant level in the experimental group whose health education program was utilizing multimedia methods. Specifically, the sub-factors of 'nutrition' and 'mental health' were higher in the multimedia using experimental health education group at the level of statistical significance(overall health perception: t=4.01, p<.001, nutritional awareness: t= 5.56, p<.001, mental health awareness: t=3.06, p<.001). Second, the total score for health-promoting behavior in the experimental group was higher than the comparison group’s total score at a statistically significant level. In particular, 'physical health', 'nutrition' health promoting behaviors in the experimental group were higher at a statistically significant level than the comparison group(overall health-promoting behaviors: t=2.92, p<.01, physical health-promoting behaviors: t=2.84, p<.01, nutrition-promoting behaviors: t=3.36, p<.001). These results indicate that multimedia based health education programs are effective in improving children's health literacy.