Date of Defense
4-26-2022
Date of Graduation
4-2022
Department
Communication
First Advisor
Sue Ellen Christian
Second Advisor
Brianne Rose Pitts
Third Advisor
Sandra Borden
Recommended Citation
Schuster, Lauren, "Teaching Kids About Media and Digital Literacy" (2022). Honors Theses. 3571.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/honors_theses/3571
Access Setting
Honors Thesis-Open Access
Purpose Cards Demo 2.mp4 (63579 kB)
Purpose Cards Demo
Purpose Cards Demo
Included in
Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Education Commons, Journalism Studies Commons, Other Communication Commons
Comments
The sole purpose of this thesis project is to interactively engage middle school students in an activity that would teach them three different media message purposes: entertain, persuade, and inform. I created a card game called Wonder Media Purpose Cards in which the objective is to quickly test the knowledge of which card represents entertain, persuade, and inform. The game can have two to four players and consists of 58 playing cards, including 12 category cards, one answer key and one direction card. The winner is whoever has the most win cards at the end of the round. The initial proposal for this thesis was arranged around a new exhibit called the Wonder Media Exhibit. It just opened in Kalamazoo at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum on April 9, 2022, and it focuses on media and news literacy. The target audience is 7th graders, and the goal of the museum is to host school field trips. I created the set of media purpose cards to distribute to educators in middle school social studies courses as both a pre- and post-field trip tool to help convey one of the central principles of media literacy, which is to know the purpose of a media message. We offer the card game to educators as an incentive to attend the exhibit with their students. It can be played within 10 minutes in the classroom and/or intertwined with a lesson on media and literacy. I choose to create a card game because the exhibit is interactive, and a card game is sticking with the exhibit’s interactive approach. Also, according to a research article by H. Herianto and Insih Wilujeng (2021), interactive learning improves attention and retention. Not only has students’ attention and retention improved, but also their motivation to learn, all due to fun interactions in lesson plans that include games and multimedia sources.