Performance of two educational approaches in increasing knowledge of high-school students about COVID-19 during the first wave of pandemic

Abstract

Objectives: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has greatly altered peoples' daily lives. Teachers and students were found quite unprepared for the emergence of the first COVID-19 wave. So, improving the knowledge of students about COVID-19 is an important issue.

Methods: In this study, 240 high students attended. Two interventions with the same contents, but in different ways, were delivered. A structured questionnaire was utilized to collect data on demographic information, and information about the behavioral intention toward COVID-19 before and after the educational interventions as well as a control group that received no educational intervention.

Results: students in all arms had similar baseline knowledge of COVID-19. The results of the post-analysis showed the efficiency of educational techniques in increasing students' knowledge about COVID-19. So the audio-visual training method performed significantly better than the visual training method (p = 0.03). Both approaches achieved better scores than the control group (P < 0.001).

Conclusion: During the outbreak of COVID-19, multimedia-based learning is a more effective educational approach and can improve the learning outcomes related to COVID-19 and achieve learning goals without close contact than written materials.

Keywords: Adolescent health; Audio-visual media; Coronavirus; Covid-19; Intervention study; Knowledge.