Digital Media Literacy Skills: A Comparative Application for Undergraduate and Associate Students in Communications

Abstract

Digital media literacy skills are a necessity in order to use the new media fields and tools that are in question to be used in many ways correctly and in moderation. The aim of this study is to determine the new media literacy levels of students studying in the field of communication science and to examine them according to some demographic characteristics. The method of the study is a screening method, and the study group consists of 285 students identified by an easily accessible sample technique. In the analysis of the data, “T-test, One-Way Analysis of Variance, Kruskal-Wallis, Mann Whitney U” tests were used. The results of the analysis show that the new media literacy levels of the students studying in the field of communication science are high. In the study, no significant differences were found according to gender and place of residence variables. In the study, a significant difference was found in favor of associate degree students in the learning status variable and in favor of groups with less income in the functional production sub-dimension if it is in the monthly income variable. In addition, it was observed that there was a significant difference in favor of the groups with more than 4 hours of use for critical consumption, functional production dimension and the whole scale according to daily digital media usage time.