A Comparison of Media Literacy in Urban and Rural Middle School Students

Abstract

In this paper, the authors compared the media literacy ability of middle school students in urban and rural areas of Hunan, China. First, the authors designed a questionnaire, based on the scales of media literacy from Yasushi GOTOH (2006), and distributed it to an urban middle school and a rural middle school to identify the diversity in media literacy abilities of middle school students in these areas. Results showed that urban school students are better than rural school students in using media, skills utilization, attitudes and critical thinking skills. Moreover, the authors designed another questionnaire to identify the reasons why there is diversity from the characteristics of family and school. Based on the results, the authors recommend several proposals to improve the situation.