The Effect of Visual Literacy Training on the Growth of Creativity and Its Components in Ten-year-old Girls based on Guilford's View with a focus on Non-Verbal Picture Books

Visual literacy, which means the skill of interpreting signs, lines and colors and understanding the message in the image, is a necessity of the present age and complements information literacy due to the mastery of the image over the text. In addition to teaching information literacy skills, librarians are expected to teach visual literacy components as well. In addition to reading wordless picture books that rely on visual literacy skills, these books can also be used as tools to teach visual literacy. Since the improvement of visual literacy skills is directly related to the growth of creativity, picture books can be a tool for teaching visual literacy and increasing creativity. For this purpose, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of visual literacy training on the growth of creativity and its components in ten-year-old girls in primary schools in Mashhad with the focus on picture books.

The present study, in terms of applied purpose and in terms of the type of research, was among the quasi-experimental researches with pre-test and post-test with the control group. The statistical population of the study was all 10-year-old girls studying in primary schools of Mashhad in the academic year of 1998-99, of them 30 were randomly selected in two experimental (15) and control (15) groups. The experimental group received visual literacy training and practiced for 16 sessions. Data collection tools were Torrance Visual Creativity Test and a researcher-made child visual literacy questionnaire that assessed the subjects' abilities. The validity of the Visual Literacy Questionnaire was confirmed by communication experts and its reliability was calculated by Cronbach's alpha coefficient (0.91). Uni-variate covariance test was used to analyze the data.

Research findings showed that there is a significant difference between the creativity scores of children who have received visual education training and children who have not received this training; These training sets have led to an increase in fluidity, flexibility, initiative and expansion in their ideas and as a result, increased their creativity.

Librarians now focus on teaching visual literacy alongside information literacy due to image dominance, as this skill can affect the ability of people such as creativity. Visual literacy training is a common practice among faculty members, librarians, musicologists, archivists, visual resource professionals, and educational technology professionals, but is held in schools as a hobby. It emphasizes the responsibilities of other educational institutions, especially libraries. In order to address this education, as in the present study, it is necessary to strengthen educational protocols with the participation of other fields such as communication and educational sciences. It is also necessary to use multiple strategies for training. This research used a picture book for education. As a result, it can be stated that in addition to understanding visual books that require visual literacy, it can also be used as a visual literacy training tool. Therefore, future research should examine how to enhance visual literacy in the library, increase it in users, identify effective picture books, and identify appropriate educational protocols.