Media literacy and attitude change: Assessing the effectiveness of media literacy training on children's responses to persuasive messages within the framework of the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion

The average American child sees in excess of 30,000 television commercials for various products each year. Most commercials are constructions of reality that attempt to sell a product or advocate an idea. Children need to understand how to evaluate and analyze critically the values and ideologies that accompany commercial messages. In short, children need to be media literate.; This dissertation adds to the small but growing body of literature that examines the effectiveness of media literacy training on children's responses to persuasive messages. Within the framework of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion, this research investigates whether media literacy training is a moderating variable in the persuasion process and whether such training affects children's attitudes toward a product of high personal relevance. A posttest-only experimental design with random assignment was used to test five independent variables: Active cognitive processing; attitude toward product; attitude toward advertisement; attitude toward TV advertising in general; and attention to peripheral cues. It was hypothesized that subjects exposed to media literacy training would follow the central route to persuasion, as opposed to the peripheral route, and have more positive attitudes toward an advertised product when exposed to many and few strong quality arguments.; Test results suggested that media literacy training was not a moderating variable in the ELM. Additionally, no evidence was found to support the prediction that media literacy, argument quality, and number of arguments influence children's attitudes. However, results indicated that media literacy training did produce differences in attitudes among subjects. Subjects exposed to the training had more negative attitudes toward the product, the advertisement, TV advertising in general, and certain peripheral cues.; The findings suggest that media literacy training makes subjects more skeptical of commercial messages because they are more aware of the techniques used by advertisers to try and persuade viewers. If children can become more aware of the persuasive techniques used by advertisers, then they will be better equipped to analyze commercials more critically and hopefully make better decisions about products. Moreover, media literacy training built into existing school curricula could be very effective at creating critical viewers.