Digital comic teaching materials: It’s role to enhance student’s literacy on organism characteristic topic

Abstract

The low level of scientific literacy of ninth grader (based on PISA score) is a trigger for science education researchers to carry out various innovations. In addition, changes in the educational platform in the new normal era, where technology becomes a mainstream, causes innovation in science education move towards providing digital technology-based media. The quality of science education at lower levels can be the cause of the low scientific literacy of students. By the reasons, the study aims to develop digital comics on the growth and development of living things for science learning in the elementary school. The media was developed on the basis of scientific literacy. The enhancement of students’ scientific literacy was then investigated on using quasi-experimental research methods with a two-group pre-/post-test design. The research subjects were third-grade students from one of the private schools at Padang City, West Sumatra, Indonesia. The experimental class selected was class III B with 19 students consisting of 12 male students and seven female students, while class III A is a control class. The results show that digital comics media are very interesting and make children fun, because apart from an attractive appearance with fun colors, it also displays a storyline that brings children into the story world. The use of the context of everyday life causes children to easily follow the story line. Science content is presented as an explanation of the context presented. Competence or thinking skills are trained through questions in the narrative. This comic also touches on the positive side of attitude, about good and bad in context, so that it can invite children to choose and be responsible for choices. The results of the implementation show that the use of digital media can effectively increase the average score of scientific literacy in the experimental class, which is significantly higher than the average score in the control class. Further studies are needed using more and more diverse subjects to ensure the sustainability of the effects of using digital comics on students’ scientific literacy.