The impact of watching TV news on children's Scientific Literacy in Media (SLiM)

Abstract

This study tends to investigate: with the influence and situation of today’s mass media and secondary school curriculum, what kind of scientific literacy would be necessary for children. In other word, in today's Taiwan, what would be remained in our children’s scientific literacy? And since the TV news has become the effective and convenient way to approach the public scientific issues, whether different TV news usage influences children’s performance of SLiM? With the development of today’s society, people's demands for knowledge about new science and technology have increased noticeably. Today, helping citizens to cultivate scientific literacy has become an important issue. Though the rapid and popular of mass media, news has become the most available (and sometimes the only) source and material for children to recognize and get related information about scientific discoveries, controversies, and events which are concerned by public (Ho & Huang, 2007; Brossard & Shanahan, 2006). A key factor in assessing scientific literacy is whether or not citizens have the critical ability to read and discuss the scientific reports in media (DeBoEr, 2000). Therefore, in this study, we defined the "scientific literacy in media (SLiM)" as the ability to understand the scientific concept and terms in science news. As the finding of Brossard & Shanahan research (2006), scientific media and science textbooks are the main sources of scientific knowledge for people. For this reason, we develop the instrument of SLiM, which combines the view of experts (science textbooks) and public news media, though this process, we try to figure a whole picture of today’s concerned scientific concepts in Taiwan. Furthermore, investigating children’s SLiM performances and inquire whether different TV news usage influences their performance of SLiM? The participants (n=803) in this study are comprised of 7th graders students (n=263)、10th graders students(n=301) and the non-science major undergraduates (n=239) in Taiwan. The results of this study revealed that 1) The theme related to biology(45.26%) and earth science(37.90%) show the higher exposure in news than those in the fields of physics(11.58%) and chemistry(5.26%). This could be the reason that the biology and earth science terms are mostly related to daily lives, the themes are seen to be more attracted to the public's interests in general. 2) Through the analysis of ANOVA, there is significant difference between the low TV news usage group, the high TV news usage group and middle TV news group (p<0.05). However, the high TV news usage group and middle TV news group were not significantly different in the performance of SLiM (p>0.05). This finding indicated that appropriately using mass media will contribute to the performance of students’ SLiM Further discussion and implications of these findings will be discussed in the conference.