Research on Factors Affecting the Choice of Children and Teenagers’ Visual Book Format in Iran (Based on Mentor Criteria)

Statement of problem and study questions: Brown and Atkins have defined education as the providing of opportunities for the student's learning. According to Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist, creation is the primary goal of education and upbringing, especially by human beings who are creative, discoverer, and able in the performance of novel tasks. The prerequisite for the implementation of this process is purposeful education since childhood. Moreover, the growth of educational centers is one of the goals of education officials worldwide. The actualization of this goal needs the active presence of the students and their interestedness in studying. The creation of such a habit as book-reading from childhood is one of the necessities thereof. Assisted by various instruments, including pictorial books, it becomes possible to create proper experiences for this age group. The non-proportion of the books with the children is one problem existent on the path of creative growth in the educational environments. Nowadays, children and adolescents’ lack of interest in studying has caused their inclination towards the ancillary media. Getting used to studying since childhood employing pictorial books can be promising in this regard.
One of the important goals of art production is communication with the audience. It is of great importance to pay attention to the type of expression used by the artist for conveying his or her message. The graphical design plays an effective role in the success of the artworks. The structuring and proper use of the visual regulations would contribute to the facilitation of the transferring of information to the addressees and reduction of the content learning difficulty. Paying attention to the books’ appearances, including the proper selection of their parts, would instigate interests in the students in studying and their educational growth. The creation of the visual diversity and application of uncommon parts would cause the attraction of the addressees and there are different notions by the various classes about these books. The question is that what factors can influence the selection of parts of the pictorial books in Iran from the perspective of the trainers and teachers of the children and adolescents? Furthermore, it has to be seen how important are factors like subject, story setting, apparent form, duration of use, number of pages, color, and design. The present field research and scientific-statistical study aim at finding the factors influencing the selection of parts of the children and adolescents’ pictorial books and the degree of their importance and expressing and suggesting defamiliarization in the book parts according to the notions and ideas of the children and adolescents’ trainers and teachers. The necessity of this research is offering a new solution for the growth of the educational centers, designers, trainers and teachers of the educational centers, education organization’s managers, and all the individuals involved in the expansion of the culture of book reading. In line with this and after the expressing of the study method, the importance of the audience’s age conditions will be dealt with for book designing in the section on the “theoretical foundations”. Then, solutions will be presented regarding how to get the children to habitually read books. In the end, the findings of the authors’ field research about the factors influencing the selection of parts of the children and adolescents’ pictorial books from the perspective of their trainers as well as the inferred results will be offered.
Study Method: the present study is applied research in terms of the objective; in regard to the author’s rate of control on the study variables, the study is non-experimental, descriptive, and causal or retrospective research. The study is to be considered as a sort of case study because the study population of this field research included the trainers and teachers of Iran’s children and adolescents. After acquiring information from an education organization, one individual was randomly selected from amongst the elite teachers and trainers of the country in each province. The information-gathering method is library and field research. In addition, note-taking and a Delphi technique-based standardized questionnaire were utilized. The acquired data were analyzed in two descriptive and inferential forms. The substantial parts used in the descriptive statistics are with the use of tables of frequency and various diagrams. In inferential statistics, use has been made of Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and one-sample independent t-test as well as Friedman test.
Conclusion: the use of appropriate tools like a book for the education of children and adolescents would exert a considerable effect on making them interested in studying. This can cause educational growth in the educational centers and schools. More successful schools are more adored by the parents and students for their progress indices are increased over time. In between, the use of different methods such as informing the families about the importance of book-reading in school sessions as well as in mass media, intra-family activities such as studying part of life and group-reading in-home, formation of students’ interest-based book-reading groups, saddlebag library design, the opening of bookstores and exhibitions in the schools of cities and villages and increase in the hours of studying and book-reading are all suggestions for the expansion of this culture. Moreover, the use of new lullabies from the new books, reading of the comic and gamebooks, watching films the books of which have been read by the children, reading loud and free studying are amongst the other solutions in this regard. Different books should be selected for various age groups and the books must be selected according to their verbal growth. The gamebooks with simpler images that stimulate the five senses are more appropriate for preschool. On the path of growth, the interests in scientific-fictitious books are increased. So, the proportion between the content and appearance of the book with the age condition is of great importance. The selection of the proper book causes interest or disinterest in studying.
The application of the uncommon book formats in proportion to the content helps to attract the audience to study. Consideration of the society of teachers' and trainers’ experiences in the kindergartens and schools causes conscious designing, production, and selection. To find the factors influencing the selection of parts of the children and adolescents’ pictorial books, a field study was carried out according to the perspectives of the study sample volume. The results obtained from the one-sample independent t-test for the prioritization of the indices demonstrated that the children’s trainers consider the subject, story setting, apparent form, production costs, duration of use, number of pages, color, and design for the selection of parts of the children’s pictorial books. Duration of use, the number of pages, color, and design are amongst the factors realized as important for the selection of the adolescents’ book formats. Furthermore, from the perspective of the adolescents’ teachers, the selection of children’s book parts depends on factors like lightness, subject, story setting, apparent form, application, duration of use, number of pages, color, and design. As for the adolescents’ books, factors like subject, application, number of pages, color, and design are taken into account. In the meanwhile, it was concluded using Friedman’s test and rating of the abovementioned indicators that the importance of the factors influencing the attractiveness of the children and adolescents’ books from the perspective of the children’s and adolescents’ trainers are due to lightness, subject, story setting, apparent form, production costs, application, duration of use, number of pages, color and design. As for the adolescents’ books, the higher priorities go-to the subject, production costs, application, duration of use, number of pages, color, and design.