ITALIAN AND TURKISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ VISUAL LITERACY SKILLS: A COMPARATIVE RESEARCH STUDY

Abstract

In recent years, a new life style has been started via internet and social media. Communication among distant individuals become popular and trendy thanks to the internet. Internet has become a vital tool of communication which is mostly carried out by the visuals like images, icons, pictures, etc. These figurative styles lead to a kind of visual communication which is in need of understanding the meanings and usage of the visuals. To understand the meaning of the visuals and to interpret them correctly one has to have a good level of visual literacy skill. Hereby, the main goal of this study is to determine the visual literacy skill level of Italian university students and the visual literacy skill level of Turkish university students. It is predicted that a comparative study conducted in Italy can contribute to the follow-up system of European structures. It is expected that the outputs of the study will contribute beyond the visual literacy content of the two countries, Türkiye and Italy. The visual literacy scores of Italian and Turkish students are supposed to be at a good level. In the research, the visual literacy scores of Italian and Turkish students did not display any meaning by gender. The findings show that visual literacy scores differs by the students’ country of residence.  The interaction of country of residence and reproduction did not have any affect on visual literacy. When Italian students evaluated their visual literacy scores up to their grade level, the results of the analysis showed that the visual literacy scores of the second grade students were higher than the first and third grade students. On the other hand, Turkish students did not show any meaningful difference according to their classroom perception. The t-test results of the Italian students' visual literacy scores according to the departments they studied did not display any difference, too.