To Develop Critical Thinking In The Media Literacy Program

Media literacy includes many different levels of skills and critical thinking skill is one of the top-level skills. In China, great progress has been made in both the study and practice of media education in the past few years. Yet, we must realize that we have to do more to meet the difficulty in this field. In practice particularly, too much energy has been put on the study of general knowledge of media literacy, which is only part of media literacy. Obviously, media literacy means more the just"being aware of the media", and I would rather agree to the notion that media literacy consists of hierarchal skills and on top of the hierarchy is critical thinking, which is called the higher-order skill in the field of instructional design. And in the field of instruction design, designers have put much more energy on the lower-order thinking skills than the higher-order ones, and it is the aim of this thesis to design a course to promote the development of critical thinking skills, which, I believe, can contribute to the study of instructional design of high-order skills. However, owing to the time and energy, I did not put this design course into real practice, thus cannot test the effectiveness of this design. But we must also face the fact that it is hardly possible to develop the students'critical thinking skill in just one course even though I can give this course to the target students in real classroom environment. All I can do is just"promote"the development of their critical thinking skill to some extent.