April 15, 2002

A Study of the Effectiveness of Media Literacy Education

Posted by Don Cudd In the"Scholarly Media Stuff Don Did in Graduate School" category 0 Comments

Note: I wrote this as a graduate student in Mass Communication at Texas State University. This paper was accepted for presentation at the school’s annual Mass Communication Week Conference.

Introduction

As American mass communication media become increasingly complex, scholars continue their calls for better attention to media literacy in the nation’s schools. James Potter, for example, points to a story told by Sherwood Schwartz, producer of the television classic Gilligans Island. After the show had aired for its first few weeks in 1964, Schwartz reports, the U.S. Coast Guard began receiving serious complaints from people angry that the agency was unable to rescue the show’s fictional characters who were stranded on a pacific island. (1998)

“Hearing a story like this, we are likely to smile and think that those people must be extremely media illiterate to be so influenced by the media that they could not tell the difference between reality and fantasy. We smugly feel that we don’t have that problem – but remember… we are constantly faced with the challenge of controlling the media’s influence on us, and the difference between us and the viewers who contacted the Coast Guard is only a matter of degree. All of us must continually decide how closely media messages reflect real life. Sometimes these decisions are relatively easy … Other decisions are harder to make accurately.” (Potter, p. 22)

Sissella Bok, carrying forth the same overall theme, points to many studies in which media violence has been found to have at least some negative effect on audiences, particularly children. (1998) Like Potter and dozens (at least) of others, she promotes media literacy education as one way to counteract the negative influences. Media literacy, she says, “views all media as offering scope for participants to learn not to submit passively to whatever comes along, but instead to examine offerings critically.” (p. 141)

The literature of media literacy is, perhaps, overstocked with points such as these. Likewise, there are plenty of suggestions such as those from Hepburn (1999) and Dugald (1999) for ways in which media literacy can be incorporated into all levels of school curriculum. And there are a number of case studies such as that by Manzo (2000) which discuss how media literacy has, indeed, been successful in some American schools.

The success stories are relatively rare, however, and therefore nearly every writer on the topic finds himself, for at least a moment, being frustrated. Media literacy proponents routinely take jabs at an American educational establishment that seems curiously slow in adopting media literacy in its schools. Renowned journalists Walter Cronkite and Hugh Downs have even weighed it, joining dozens of other media experts in bemoaning that “the United States lags behind other countries when it comes to media literacy.” (Magee, 1996) Taken as a whole, media literacy literature seems to scream from the most progressive of mass communication intellectuals “Americans have a problem adequately understanding the media to which they are increasingly being exposed. We know how to fix that problem. Why is it that so few people take us seriously?!”

But in 1999 two of America’s leading media literacy exerts found that media literacy does seem to be taken seriously in American schools — at least on paper. (Kubey & Baker, 1999) In light of a 1998 New York Times report which said that only 12 states at that time had curricular guidelines for media study, the pair took a detailed look at the official curriculum statements in all 50 states. “We have found to our own surprise – and that of all the media educators with whom we’ve spoken – that at least 48 state curricular frameworks now contain one or more elements calling for some form of media education,” they said. (p. 56) In particular, they found that “Texas unquestionably presents the most developed and comprehensive media education framework. Florida’s and North Carolina’s are also impressive. Kansas and Kentucky were the only states we found that did not include nonprint media education, at least in the educational frameworks we were able to locate.” (p. 57)

At first glance, then, the Kubey and Baker study seems to indicate that media literacy proponents have quietly — even unconsciously — won their case. Could it be that media literacy is a significant part of the American education experience after all? This paper investigates that possibility.

The following pages report on a study designed to find out what some Texas college students think and know about some of the media literacy concepts the Kubey and Baker study indicates they should have been exposed to — in one way or another– during their first twelve years of school. Media literacy proponents should not be satisfied with a simple “paper-tiger” showing that schools are teaching media literacy while, in fact, that teaching is largely ineffective. This paper asks if, perhaps, that is just what Kubey and Baker uncovered.

Definition of Media Literacy

Any discussion of media literacy should be careful to establish early on a definition of the term. This is because media literacy appears in literature as being everything from the ability to use oral and written language, to an accumulation of knowledge about pop culture, to a critical cultural issue, to the ability to access various types of media, to suggestions for parents concerned about limiting their child’s access to violence and pornography. (Potter, p. 3) Confusion, then, is the likely result if a paper does not specify exactly what it means by media literacy.

The comments below from television writer Walter Goodman, probably the most outspoken American critic of media literacy, illustrate the problems such confusion can create for the entire media literacy movement. (Magee, 1996) Not knowing what ( to use his sarcastic name) “the media literacy gang” means by the term, Goodman simply dismisses the idea as “another fad” in education — akin to sex education, drivers education and home economics.

“Literacy really only has two meanings. One is an acquaintance with cultural subject of the past — the classics. And the other means knowing how to read and write. You put those two things together for a course that has nothing to do with reading and writing — and has nothing to do with the classics certainly — well, it’s just another way to mess up language for promotional purposes.” (Magee, 1996)

But Goodman’s definition is a far cry from that of the “gang” of educators he derides. Below is a look at what media literacy proponents typically mean by the term.

“Media literacy is education”

That remark from David Considine during a televised town hall meeting about media literacy (Magee, 1996) seems to sums up the experts’ consensus about the definition. Beginning with a 1982 declaration from the United Nation’s Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organization media literacy has been seen, world-wide, as generally aiming to be a “preparation for responsible citizenship.” (Buckingham, 2001) While that goal is sometimes criticized as being too broad, it reflects what American scholars have long said about education in general: “Citizens are expected to make important and independent decisions about governmental problems and their political future. It is clear that many of these decisions require problem solving of a very high order. It is impossible to tell an individual in advance how to vote or even the basis on which he should vote. These are matters he must decide repeatedly throughout his life whenever a major election takes place. But more than specific elections and voting is the concept of individuals in a democracy as independent decisions makers who, in the last analysis, are responsible for the conduct of a democratic political system as well as a democratic way of life.” (Bloom, 1956, p. 41)

The above quotation comes from Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, a classic education text which established the current American educational tradition of classifying learning objectives into six major classes: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. This classification system, known to education scholars as the famous Bloom’s Taxonomy, addresses the broadness of educational goals. It, therefore, is at the heart of our definition of media literacy.

Bloom’s classes are hierarchical; they each (except for knowledge, of course) require that students master objectives in the lower classes before advancing to the next classes. The “high order” problem solving skills discussed in the quotation typically fall in the analysis, synthesis and evaluation classes. Education scholars call these classes “the critical thinking skills”. (Bloom, 1956) And critical thinking skills applied a student’s interaction with mass media (television, newspapers, radio, internet, advertising, etc.) is media literacy in a nutshell, the major American experts agree. (Magee, 1996)

But what, then, is critical thinking?

The careful reader will note that the potential vagueness of “critical thinking” presents yet another problem for media literacy, a field day of sorts for skeptics like Walter Goodman: “Critical viewing skills? This is just jargon from academia. Everyone has critical viewing skills. Are we going to teach people how to have the right critical viewing skills? I’ve been reviewing for quite a few years, and I wouldn’t know how to do that. I don’t know what the right critical viewing skills are, and schools don’t know either.”(Magee, 1996)

While a thorough discussion of the very complex Bloom’s Taxonomy is beyond the scope of this paper, an overview of what the system says about the critical thinking classes is needed to address the critics’ concerns.

“ABOUT ANALYSIS: At a somewhat more advanced level than the skills of comprehension and application are those involved in analysis. In comprehension the emphasis is on the grasp of the meaning and intent of the material. In application it is on remembering and bringing to bear upon given material the appropriate generalizations or principals. Analysis emphasizes the breakdown of the material into its constituent parts and detection of the relationships of the parts and of the way they are organized. It may also be directed at the techniques and devices used to convey the meaning or to establish the conclusion of a communication.” (Bloom, 1956, p. 144)

“ABOUT SYNTHESIS: Synthesis is here defined as the putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole. This is a process of working with elements, parts, etc., and combining them in such a way as to constitute a pattern or structure not clearly there before. Generally this would involved a recombination of parts of previous experience with new material, reconstructed into a new and more or less well-integrated whole… It should be emphasized that this is not completely free creative expression since generally the student is expected to work within the limits set by particular problems, materials or some theoretical and methodological framework.” (p. 162)

“ABOUT EVALUATION: Evaluation is defined as the making of judgments about the value, for some purpose, of ideas, works, solutions, methods, material, etc. It involves the use of criteria as well as standards for appraising the extent to which particulars are accurate, effective, economical, or satisfying. The judgments may be either quantitative or qualitative, and the criteria may be either those determined by the student or those which are given to him.” (p. 185)

By teaching objectives which fall into these very specific categories (and which, therefore, build upon previously taught objectives which fall into the knowledge, comprehension and application classes) media literacy can give students the intellectual tools they need to adequately analyze, synthesis, and evaluate media messages and, thus, be good participants in society. The development (and teaching) of such specific objectives is a tricky endeavor, to say the least. But, despite the worries of skeptics like Goodman, it is possible — especially after a careful study of Bloom’s Taxonomy which, for decades, has been required reading for new teachers in America.

With media literacy now defined, as educators understand it, we are ready to turn to our study, which reviews and then tests some of the media literacy objectives listed in the Kubey and Baker report. In the study we examine the objectives in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, judging how well they contribute to media literacy’s “critical thinking” goal. Then we analyze the results of our survey which was designed to find out whether a group of Texas college students learned those objectives effectively in their pre-college days.

The study

In late 2001 a 10-question “Media Literacy Survey” was given to 248 students at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. The survey tested what the students know and think about the three media literacy objectives identified most often in Kubey and Baker’s report. Each student was in the university’s “College Writing” class taught by English Department faculty and required of all undergraduate students in the university. Most of these students (222 of them to be precise) were college freshmen who graduated from high school in the spring of 2001. The students were given the survey by either their course instructor or by this paper’s author during one class period sometime between November 22 and December 3, 2001. They were asked to complete the survey on a voluntary and anonymous basis. A list of the questions is in figure 1. (It might be important to note that this survey was also given to 162 students in advanced mass communication courses at the same university. The intent was to compare the results of the two groups to test the hypothesis that students formally trained in college mass communication are likely to be more media literate than those who have not. That hypothesis received support in our results, but that is beyond the scope of the present paper.)

Fig. 1

Survey Questions

1. For practical reasons, reporters can’t always be involved with the groups which they cover (because they generally cover a great many different groups in the course of their careers). In an ideal world, however, it would be best to have news articles written mostly by members of the groups involved in the stories.