University of Missouri to Assess News Literacy Among High School Students

Columbia, MO – November 18, 2011 – (RealEstateRama) — One of the important roles of journalism is informing the public about significant events & issues. However, that purpose requires an audience who critically thinks about what information they get in the media. This skill of critical thinking is more commonly known as “news literacy”. Assessing the level of a person’s news literacy has been a long-time challenging task for media researchers and educators. Now, University of Missouri scholars are developing methods to be able to measure the news literacy among key population demographics which is teenagers. University of Missouri Associate Professor of the School of Journalism & project’s lead researcher, Stephanie Craft says that understanding the news literacy is essentially important as the new technology makes the issue difficult.