Development of Critical Media Literacy Scale for Primary School Students

Abstract

As the internet and social media have become increasingly widespread, critical media literacy and the ability to measure this skill from an early age have become increasingly important. In Turkey, no valid and reliable measurement tool suitable for this age group has been found. For this reason, in this study, it was aimed to develop a critical media literacy disposition scale for 3rd and 4th grade primary school students. For this purpose, a literature review was conducted to develop a draft scale, an item pool was created, expert opinion was sought, a pilot application was conducted, EFA was conducted with 344 students, CFA was conducted with 541 students, and internal consistency coefficients of the items in the scale were calculated. With the completion of these stages, the scale consisted of 12 items and two dimensions, 7 of which were critical media reading (CMR) and 5 of which were critical media writing (CMW). As a result, EFA and CFA analyses show that the scale is valid. The reliability value of the CMR dimension of the scale was calculated as 82.5 and the reliability value of the CMW dimension was calculated as 79.4. The reliability coefficient of the total scale was calculated as 87.2. These coefficients show that the scale has a reliable structure.