Assessing media literacy competences: A study with Portuguese young people

Abstract

Daily life is indelibly marked by the media, which create (or help to create) different forms of leisure, entertainment and work. Reading, analysing, decoding, understanding and interpreting the media and the content they convey, as well as creating and producing messages, are today fundamental competences required to deal with and manage the flows of communication and information that reach us through various media and platforms. The following study involved administering an online questionnaire to a sample of 679 Portuguese students, mostly between the ages of 17 and 18. The aim was to characterize their media access and use in their final year of compulsory education, to determine their knowledge of the media, as well as their analysis, interpretation and production competences, which were placed on a three-level scale of media literacy. Findings suggest that knowledge is at a basic level, in most cases at the lowest level of the scale.