Media Literacy in Support of Critical Thinking

One of the main aims of the Education agenda in the last decade has been to develop critical thinking (C. T.) in children, in order to educate them to be active, involved citizens in democratic society. Different Media Literacy (M.L.) studies explore C.T. towards media texts by cultivating the pupils’ ability to respond critically to both surface and underlying media messages. This paper discusses partial results of a research study designed to examine the support provided by an M.L. program in the development of C.T. of pupils aged 10‐12 years in northern Israel. The resulting data demonstrate that M.L. programmatic intervention and its long‐term cumulative effect were two important factors underlying the significant differences found among the test groups. An interesting variable was also found which explained the superior results of the low achievements pupils (as evaluated by their teachers) compared with the less pronounced gains found among the high achievement pupils. Finally the paper asks theoretical questions about the extent to which a young critical thinker is capable of skeptical reflection towards media texts.