The Effect of Using Digital Comics as Sex Education Media at SD Negeri Gunung Sari I, Makassar City

Abstract

This study was motivated by the importance of introducing sex education at an early age to elementary school children to promote self-protection and an appropriate understanding of their bodies. This study aims to determine students’ level of understanding of sex education before and after the implementation of digital comic media and to analyze the effect of using digital comic media on improving sex education understanding among second-grade students at SD Negeri Gunung Sari I, Makassar City. The use of this medium is intended to address cultural barriers that continue to regard sex education as a taboo subject, as well as the limited openness of teachers and parents in providing such education. This quantitative study employed a pre-experimental design using a one-group pretest–posttest design. The participants consisted of 24 second-grade students. Data were collected through pretest and posttest assessments and analyzed using the non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test. The results showed that students’ understanding before the implementation of digital comic media was categorized as low, whereas after the intervention, it increased to the good-to-very-good category. The Wilcoxon test yielded a Z value of −4.305 with an Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed) value of 0.000 (< 0.05), indicating a statistically significant difference between the pretest and posttest results. These findings demonstrate that the use of digital comics had a positive and significant effect on improving students’ understanding of sex education. Therefore, digital comic media can effectively visualize sensitive content in an engaging and accessible manner, enabling teachers to use it as an educational medium for preventing sexual abuse among elementary school students while delivering sex education in an effective, engaging, and developmentally appropriate manner.