Effectiveness of puppet show on knowledge about child safety based on learning styles among school children at Udupi District in India

Introduction: Child injury is a global public health issue. Creating awareness on child safety among children is very necessary for the better understanding of the problems among children. Objective: to identify the learning styles, incidence of child injury, knowledge regarding child safety, effectiveness of puppet show as a teaching method in improving the knowledge on child safety, find the difference in the knowledge scores regarding child safety among 5^th and 6^th standard students with different learning styles. Methodology: A total of 111 participants from 5^th and 6^th standard were selected for the study, using multistage cluster sampling method. Results: Among 111, most (55%) were visual learners and remaining were auditory learners. The overall occurrence of child injuries (involved 4 areas i.e road injury, pedestrian injury, sports and playground injury and good touch and bad touch) was 98.19% among study participants. In the pre-test, majority of the participants (76.6 %) had poor knowledge and 23.4 % had satisfactory knowledge and none of them had excellent or good knowledge on child safety. In the post-test 36.9 % had excellent knowledge and 38.7 % had good knowledge, 24.3% had satisfactory knowledge and none had poor knowledge. Puppet show was effective in increasing the knowledge level on child safety (Z=-9.153, P=0.001). Puppet show as a teaching method, does not make any difference in the knowledge grasping capacity of students with different learning styles (Z=-1.626, P = 0.104). Conclusion: The study concluded that puppet show as a teaching method is a useful and effective teachinstrategy which can be utilised in order to teach the students.