2024 Volume 18 Issue 1 Pages 19-30
The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate nutrition education materials to facilitate “access to food information” for children enrolled in elementary schools without a nutrition teacher.
We developed six posters on nutrition education: (1) Importance and methods of hand washing, (2) Table manners and how to hold chopsticks, (3) Ways to spend one’s summer vacation, (4) A balanced diet, (5) Food loss and SDGs [please define abbreviation], and (6) Tooth brushing and cavity prevention. Posters (2), (4), and (6) also included games. All posters were displayed in the hallway in front of the nurse’s office at C Elementary School in B City and at the children’s cafeteria in the same school district. The posters were displayed for one month until the end of October 2021. We distributed a handout to the children once a month that included the same content as the poster. Sixty-one children at C Elementary School were surveyed with a self-administered questionnaire to determine the degree of poster viewing and impressions from the poster.
Seventeen children indicated that they had viewed 1-3 posters, and 43 indicated that they had viewed 4-6 posters (p＝0.868). The poster that left the greatest impression on most respondents was poster (6) (37.3%). The percentages of those who played with the game elements of the posters were 57.1% for poster (2), 37.5% for poster (4), and 55.4% for poster (6). The percentage of those who read the handouts at least once was 55.7%. Children who viewed 4-6 posters showed no difference in their impressions of the posters, practiced playing with the posters more, and more often had conversations about the posters and tended to read the handouts than them who viewed 0-3 posters.
These findings suggested that displaying posters that are easy to understand visually and use real objects or models may improve children’s impression of the posters. Although causal relationships could not be examined because this was a cross-sectional study, there is a possibility that posters and newsletters can be used as nutrition education materials to promote access to food information that can help form desirable eating habits in elementary schools where no nutrition teachers are available.
In the future, we hope to help foster “access to food information” for children enrolled in elementary schools without a nutrition teacher by proactively informing the children about our posters and viewing correspondence.
