Alfabetización visual de profesores en ejercicio a través del diseño gráfico para mejorar la planificación y desarrollo del proceso de aprendizaje

Abstract

In today's digital age, learning environments as well as educational resources are highly visual, filled with well-designed and high-quality images and graphic elements, which constantly convey a message to viewers. Hence, teachers need to develop visual literacy skills to become capable of accessing images and visual information appropriately; and thus employ them effectively to improve the process of teaching and learning, through the interpretation, evaluation, use, and creation of new content and educational resources. This doctoral thesis examined the effect of a training process for developing visual literacy on in-service teachers. For this purpose, a visual literacy course was designed based on the principles of Graphic Design and it was structured according to the Visual Literacy Competency Standards presented by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) (2011). A mobile app was also developed and used throughout the course. This research was proposed from a quantitative approach and it was divided into two parts. Due to the magnitude of the research, we refer to each part as study one and study two. The first study was a quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design. It was employed to examine the effect of the visual literacy course through the comparison between pretest and posttest data results, in a sample of 43 teachers. The second study was a non-experimental cross-sectional design, to describe the relationship between the teaching material quality made by the teachers and the level of visual literacy achieved after the intervention, in a sample of 37 teachers. Data were collected through two instruments, a visual literacy test to measure the level of visual literacy achieved by the teachers and a rubric to evaluate the quality of the teaching material produced by the educators who participated in the course. Both instruments were designed and validated for this research. In the first study, it was performed descriptive statistics of pretest and posttest variables, then normality was analyzed by applying the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test on the difference. Finally, according to the distribution analysis, parametric or non-parametric tests were applied for comparing the two samples. In the second study, it was calculated the Pearson correlation to find if there is a relationship between the variables. Data were analyzed with SPSS software version 25 and Gpower 3.1. The global result indicates that there are statistically significant differences in the pretest and posttest scores. The results by competencies, which will be explained during the development of this document, show that the training process had effects on competencies 1, 2, 5, and 6. However, the results of competency 3 show low scores in the posttest, and the results of competency 4 indicate there is no difference between the pretest and the posttest means.The results of the second study show that there is a large positive relationship between the quality of the teaching material produced by the participants and the results of the posttest. Indeed, the coefficient of determination indicates that 40% of the visual competence acquired by the teachers after attending the course is explained by the quality of the teaching material. The research hypothesis of this doctoral thesis was confirmed: the design of a course and a mobile app aimed for developing visual literacy on in-service teachers leads to better planning and development of the instructional material elaborated for the improvement of the teaching and learning process.Additionally, a survey was conducted to find out the participants' opinion about the visual literacy course and the usefulness of the mobile application, as well as details of their experience during this process and as users of the mobile application. This doctoral thesis project contributes to the visual literacy pedagogical research focused on the educators, through a complete proposal of training and evaluation of the level of visual literacy acquired by those who participated in the training activity and used the mobile application developed to support this process