The Necessity of Media Knowledge Education to Students to Promote their Media Literacy Competency

Subject Areas : Iranian Sociological Review

Alireza Bastani ¹ , Tahmures Shiri ² , Aliakbar Farhangi ³

1 - Department of Sociology, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran
2 - Department of Sociology, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran
3 - Department of Management, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Received: 2019-06-16 Accepted : 2019-06-16 Published : 2019-03-01

Keywords: Media literacy, media messages, critical thoughts, media messages analyzing, critical media literacy,

Abstract :

The paper designs an indigenous module to upgrade the media literacy among high school students utilizing the “multimedia education”, “the cultural studies”, the theory of “New London Group” and “the political media literacy” by Ferguson. The method used is in two categories, documentary and survey. The population comprises of the tenth and eleventh graders in the 2nd region of the ministry of education classification upon the Cochran formula for which 384 students were selected. The cluster sampling, piecemeal analysis were used as the observation unit was the students. We have two series of variables for which the media literacy is the dependent and the students’ knowledge of media, the ways of media productions and the critical thoughts are the independents. Knowledge of media encompasses four sub-categories as the economics, politics, culture and the religious components. The hypothesis used is of the causative and the formal statistical test is of the simple regression and multi-variables. The regression results proves that independent variables have the meaning effect on the dependent variable for which the ways of media productions, critical thoughts and having the knowledge and cognizance of media dedicate the maximum effect on the dependent variable respectively but their effectiveness are not strong. The findings in this research prove that among the three indexes of the economic, political and cultural cognizance, it is only the economic knowledge which has a weak meaningful effect on the media literacy.