A Study on Nursery School Teacher's Knowledge and Education of Nutrition Care in Gwang-Ju

Song, Jin; Heo, Young Ran

Abstract

This study was done to come up with a solution to effectively increase nutrition knowledge and education among nursery school teachers in the Gwang-ju metropolitan city area. The scores of teacher's nutrition knowledge were around the average of 9.4 points on a 15-point scale, which is about 63.1 points on a 100-point scale. When the types of subjects were compared, we recognized that the nursery school teachers with a college degree or those who have any training/education in nutrition had the highest scores in nutrition knowledge. Also, the nursery schools who have more than 101 children or public nursery schools had the highest scores in nutrition knowledge (p < 0.05). We can conclude that the knowledge of nutrition of nursery teachers is very lacking and it is not as high as it should be. In addition, we can also see that the dietary guidance and nutrition education time spent towards the children was very short. The lack of professional knowledge and education seems to be due to shortage of educational materials and because the teachers themselves lack the knowledge to pass on to their predecessors. In fact, even the teachers themselves feel the need to set up more nutrition-related education programs, obtain more guides and materials to teach them, as well as implement more organized and systemized teaching methods.