Subject-Specific Humor as a Creative Method to Communicate Health Knowledge

Abstract

As part of health promotion, the aim of health education is to teach students health knowledge as a basis for more health-conscious behavior. It can enable them to make educated decisions on how to prevent dangers to their health. Given the fact that skin cancer rate rises, we chose sun protection as our topic. Since it is already known that measures that work with deterrent examples have a moralizing effect and are less effective, a creative method could be a promising alternative. Implementing humor into learning material might be an effective approach. That is why we developed learning material for health edu cation with a specific type of humor called “subject-specific humor (SSH)” in this study. Cartoons with SSH were combined with complementary text to form new self-learning material which was used to teach students aged 9 to 13. The aim of the study was to find out more about the possibility of teaching health education by using SSH in elementary and secondary school. An inter vention study in control group design was carried out using a pre-post-follow-up test design. In two groups, the students were taught with the newly developed self-learning material with or without SSH. Central point of the evaluation was the change of performance regarding the three variables content knowledge, interest and health behavior. In this article, we focus on the learninggain since health knowledge is the basis for health-conscious behavior. All tested students achieved significant learning gains. Unexpectedly, there was no significant difference between the intervention group and the control group.