A Study of Children's Media Literacy in Japan

Annual Conference : 2004, Uniiversity of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology. UKThis session outlines Japanese Children's media literacy. In this paper, we focused on three aspects of media literacy: Skills of Media Utilization, Critical Viewing and Positive Attitude in information gathering, and tried to make a scale of these abilities. As a result of our research of 401 Japanese children, we reached the following four conclusions. 1) As a result of the correlation analysis, the correlation coefficient of scale and each item is high. As a result of GP analysis, there are significant differences in all items. Then, the reliability of the scale is confirmed. 2) We find out that a person with Positive Attitude has a high level of skills and a high level of Critical Viewing. 3) Students with a high level of Skills of Media Utilization and Positive Attitude in information gathering think that the internet is easy to use, accurate, has up-to-date information, and like it. On the other hand, the low level group feels that TV is easy and accurate, and they like it. They seem to have a tendency to overestimate the information from TV