Modern media criticism and media literacy education: The opinions of russian university students

Abstract

The authors analyze the results of two universities students' survey aimed at finding out the respondents' media competence levels. The findings confirm a general tendency, that commonly, less than a quarter of the young audience reveals a high level development of the media competence's motivational index. A considerably larger part of respondents, about a half, demonstrates a low level of the motivational index. The analysis of the received data proves that a high degree of the media contact frequency and a high level of media competence's motivational index are not directly linked with an ability level to analyze a media text comprehensively. Nevertheless, the levels of interpretational/evaluation parameters of the audience's media competence to a large extent reflect the levels of their informational and motivational descriptors. Moreover, it turns out that the high level of informational index does not necessarily correlate to the level of media competence's evaluation index. On the whole, the survey shows that media competence of modern students needs to be developed. Therefore, university students (not less that school students) do need media literacy courses.