| dc.description | The aim of this study was to map out the level of media literacy of Estonian youth.
The study set out to find out whether it is necessary to protect children at that particular age
from the media, what is their media education and what kind of deficiencies they
themselves see in their media education. The study also set out to evaluate the adequacy of
the level of early teens’ critical reading and the base document of functional literacy for
national curriculum.
The opinions of earlier media literacy theoreticians fall into two categories: most of
them think of media education as something important, although long-term effects of it
have not yet been found; it is thought that children’s media literacy is lower than adults’
and therefore, there is a need for protecting them from the media. On the other hand, many
acknowledged developmental pedagogical scientists find that at the beginning of the teen
years many of the children become capable of analysing media at the same level as many
adults and Martin Lindström, who is engaged in marketing for children, claims that the
generation of today is much better adapted to living in the middle of lots of media than the
adults.
In the course of this study ten semi-structured informant interviews were carried
through with children of the age of 11-13 from Tallinn. These interviews were the grounds
to find out how the interviewees distinguish between and find facts and opinions, what kind
of aims and people they see behind media messages, what kind of target groups they are
able to identify, which techniques of the media they notice, how they evaluate the
relevance, reliability etc. of the articles and what kind of media education they have.
On the grounds of the material collected during this study, it can be said that the media
literacy of children in early adolescence and adults still differ somewhat in their level but
the difference between them is not so big. Moreover, it cannot be said which of the groups
is more literate than the other. It seems that the adeolescents are better in some catogories
and vice versa. Then again both groups had their weak points. Therefore, there is no real reason for protecting the youth from the media, but both groups could use some more
media education.
Adults dare to express their opinions more than the adolescents and see the bigger
picture of the case but the adolescents are especially particulate at the facts and more
neutral towards the media messages. Both, the early adolescents and adults trust the media
very much, but articles that were published later, proved that these articles weren’t
completely flawless.
It can also be said, that adults were even more influenced by the media, because
they instantly developed opinions from the basis of information that came from the media
that it was a case of deliberate child abandoning and that the parents did not care about the
child. Early teens on the contrary did not create such clear opinions in their heads of “good
and bad characters” nor the reasons of the child having been found alone.
Children in their early teen years seem to have a better capability of finding and
remembering information from the media, because unlike adults, the were able to name lots
of correct facts. It might be the result of constant fact learning at school, but the only
certain thing is, that early teens made less generalisations.
When it comes to media education and the absences in that, it is impossible to say
according to this study if media education is necessary or not, because the interviewees
were quite successful in answering all the questions concerning their media literacy, but
then again they don’t remember almost anything about media education from school and
they didn’t mention that a lot of use would have been made of recognised techniques of
developing media literacy at home as well. Also, they don’t feel much need of extra media
education from home nor school.
It was interesting that those early teens with whom teachers had discussed media
Events with at school, were a little bit more successful in analyzing the articles. But one
boy claimed that he could use more theoretical media education and said that he saw no
point in discussing articles. | en |
