Impact of Educational Leaflet Dissemination on University Students’ Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice toward COVID-19 in Indonesia

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a public health problem at the global level. University students are expected to have positive knowledge, attitudes, and practice towards COVID-19, not only for themselves but also for their community. A pre-post study was conducted on undergraduate students at Universitas Andalas, Indonesia, in 2020 to explore the impact of an educational poster on university students’ knowledge, attitude, and practice towards COVID-19. An amount of 407 students participated in this study. Most of the participants were female (N=308; 75.68%), aged 20 years and above (N=251; 61.67%), and were non-health professional students (N=337; 82.80%). Female students had significantly better knowledge, while female and health sciences students had better preventive practice related to COVID-19. After the intervention, only attitude scores significantly differ from the pre-intervention score (p=0.004). However, the proportion of participants who had poorer practice was higher than the pre-intervention, although the number of participants who had practice improvement also increased. The educational leaflet significantly improves students’ attitudes, but not their knowledge and practice. Careful design of the educational method is needed to improve university students’ knowledge, attitude, and practice.