Part 3 - cont.

affected by operating with media literacy skills as a type of filter on attitudes and knowledge. We don't want to make great claims that we're going to solve the problem completely. Media literacy is not a magic bullet."

What Do Students Already Know?

We need to know more about what students already know before we assume we can intervene with particular health or media literacy campaigns. This simple, fundamental idea is often neglected in the development of campaigns and curricula (Davies, 1997).

Operational Definitions and Measurement Validity

Two significant challenges were identified as critical to the development of research in media literacy. The first challenge faced by both quantitative and qualitative research in media education is the problem of method reaction effects, i.e., the difficulty of measuring processes in ways that do not interfere with the phenomena under study. The second challenge identified was the question of how to operationally define component skills of media literacy, like "accessing," "evaluating," "analyzing" and "communicating" messages using a variety of forms. As one participant said, "Just because someone's ticked a lot of boxes and shown that they know the difference between reality and fantasy, does that prove that that carries over, that that means that they have a real grasp?"