Abstract:
Background: There exists well-established literature on the incidence and prevalence of communication disorders in school going children. If these children are left untreated there can be serious long-term complications. When it comes to the early detection and appropriate referral of students with communication disorders, teachers play a crucial role. Hence, teachers need to be familiar with various childhood communication disorders (CCDs), management options provided by various professionals as well as classroom strategies to be used for supporting such children.
Aim: The primary goal the current study was to develop an online-based Flipbook in Malayalam for primary school teachers on childhood communication disorders (CCDs). A pre-posttest was also carried out on these teachers to study the usefulness of the Flipbook.
Methods: The material for the flipbook was initially developed in English by compiling information from existing pamphlets, books and articles, content validated by five speech-language pathologists, and translated to Malayalam after incorporating all the suggestions and modifications provided by the validators. An additional content validation was carried out for the Malayalam material by a group of six speech-language pathologists and five school teachers who are native speakers of Malayalam. Followed by this, a Flipbook was developed. To check the efficiency of the developed Flipbook among primary school teachers; a pre-posttest evaluation was carried out using a questionnaire developed based on the Flipbook. Among the 30 school teachers with whom the flipbook was shared, only 16 teachers successfully completed the posttest in tele-mode via google forms. Shapiro Wilk’s test of normality showed that the obtained data was not normally distributed. Hence, Wilcoxson's signed Rank test and Mann-Whitney U-test were used to rank the statistical measures and compute the results.
Results: From the findings, it was evident that for the participants understanding and knowledge regarding CCDs had significantly improved in the post-test evaluation. The results of the age-wise comparison of the participants indicated that there was a significant difference in scores across groups. Teachers belonging to the age group of 41-55 years performed significantly better in terms of knowledge on assessment and treatment of CCDs as well as overall knowledge on CCDs when compared to teachers belonging to 25-40 years age-group. However, there was no significant differences were observed in the performance of upper and lower primary teachers. During the post-test evaluation, feedbacks were also collected and it was positive and promising.
Conclusions: Hence, it may be concluded that the developed Flipbook material could increase the understanding and knowledge of various CCDs among primary school teachers in Kerala and there is a need for similar awareness-based studies in other Indian languages involving large number of primary school teachers.