Varateismeliste meediapädevus Eestis artiklite kriitilise lugemise näitel

Date

2009

Authors

Tamming, Maria

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

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.

Keywords

H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd

Citation