Detalhes do Documento

The project "Media Literacy in Higher Education: an exploratory study within Media Studies students" aims to assess the degree of media literacy of students in the field of Communication Sciences, considering that they are about to join one of the main areas that face, in a daily basis, the challenge of misinformation. Thus, starting from the case of the Social Communication course taught at the Superior School of Education/ Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, we applied the first phase of a questionnaire survey designed and validated to assess the degree of preparation of future professionals in this area. The first results of the questionnaire, applied at the end of the 2020/2021 school year, show some tendencies in the profile of students attending the final year of the degree (3rd year) and raise some warnings, mainly because it regards young people, about to enter the market, with apparent difficulties in distinguishing information from entertainment and opinion. Regarding journalism as a profession, the significant doubts concern whether entertainment programs include journalists subject to the code of ethics. Students seem to be unaware of the differences between information programs and entertainment programs, probably due to the dilution of barriers and the emergence of new infotainment formats. This difficulty in clearly distinguishing between information and entertainment is also noticeable because many respondents classify a general culture program as an information program. As for the distinction between information and opinion, half of the students misclassify the excerpts presented, which denotes the difficulty of distinguishing texts in which the author makes value judgments from texts in which comments are attributed to sources of information.