Measuring the Effects of Media Education Activities on High School Students' Trust in Media

This paper presents a thesis project investigating the effects of news media education activities in a school environment on young people's level of news literacy. The rise of social media alongside traditional news outlets (television, newspapers, radio) is expanding the media landscape, leading to information overload (Dilevko, 1998; Kajimoto Vraga et al., 2021). Journalists have to adapt to these changes to stand out from the amount of information available (Rebillard, 2006; Tandoc et al., 2018). The general confidence in news and politics is declining, while a fear of "fake news" increases (Bowe, 2019; Higdon, 2020; Tornero et al., 2018). Yet in a democracy, it is essential for people to have access to reliable and verifiable information, to enable them to act as empowered citizens (Swart, 2021; Tamboer, Daalmans, et al., 2022). Mainly defined as a sub-dimension of media literacy, news literacy refers to the abilities and knowledge needed to access, analyze, and evaluate journalistic information, and the understanding of the changing informational context (Guldin et al., 2021; Maksl et al., 2017). There are various definitions of the concept covering dimensions such as knowledge of the media environment, motivation to consume news, individual news practices or on trust in the news media, which will be the focus of this paper. News literacy scales can be used to assess citizens’ attitudes and behaviors towards these informational changes. Knowing their practices helps to develop ways of teaching them how to become active citizens. School students constitute an interesting audience: studies have shown that young people tend to overestimate their news consumption abilities (Tamboer, Kleemans, et al., 2022). They also use media differently from adults, which is reflected in their various approaches to news consumption (Swart, 2021). This research seeks to measure the effects of news media education workshops on high school students’ trust in news media. The paper rests on a case study of activities conducted in high schools in France by a journalism school. Led by journalists, these workshops engage students in the creation of a news project from scratch. Pre- and post-questionnaires covering six aspects of news literacy were developed and deployed in high school classes. The concept of trust in the news media was questioned through a five-item Likert scale, in which students were asked to position themselves individually. The five items were selected from a pre-existing scale (Maksl et al., 2015), then adapted and translated to suit the French context. The current results show a slight positive progression for all scale items. The survey included a control group, allowing additional analysis to determine the significance of the progression difference with the evaluated group. These analyses reveal a significant difference in progression for three of the five items on the scale. This suggests that engaging students in the production of news media contents, as part of media education workshops, may play a positive role in students’ level of trust. The research will also question and explore the link between trust in the media and the motivation to consume news, as well as between trust and the ability to judge the reliability of news.