Introducing Media Literacy to Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Despite the pervasiveness of media into all aspects of most peoples’ lives, many people still perceive "media" as only television ads and newspaper articles. The truth is that media is all around us all the time, impacting us in ways we don't, but should, recognize. This instructional module was designed to introduce undergraduate students to the concept of “media literacy,” or of being aware how ubiquitous a presence media has in our lives. The web-based module used pre-, embedded, and post-assessments, videos, images, and narrative to introduce media literacy. Pre-assessments showed that students had minimal pre-existing knowledge of media literacy and post-test results showed an improvement in understanding of the material presented. Most of the responses to the three open-ended post-test questions were informative and positive. This study shows a need for media literacy education and this researcher hopes to market this tutorial to instructors and students in all subject areas.