Appreciating, Interpreting and Understanding Posters via Levels of Visual Literacy

This study was conducted in Malaysia to discover how meaning and appreciation were construed among 35 Form Five students. Panofsky’s theory was employed to discover the levels of reasoning among students when various types of posters were displayed. The independent variables used were posters that carried explicit and implicit meanings; the moderating variable was students’ visual literacy levels while the dependent variable was the implicit interpretation level. One-way ANOVA was applied for the data analysis. The data showed that before students were exposed to Panofsky’s theory, there were differences in thinking between boys, who did not think abstractly or implicit in comparison to girls. The study showed that students’ visual literacy in posters depended on the use of visual texts and illustration. This paper discuss further on posters with text only have a tendency to be too abstract as opposed to posters with visuals plus text. Keywords—explicit visual, implicit visual, visual interpretation, visual literacy