The use of critical thinking skills to detect bias in written press
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Keywords
critical thinking, media bias, reading comprehension
Abstract
The present study is part of my doctoral research about university students’ critical ability to identify media bias. The participants were two groups of students from a language department at an Ecuadorian university. There was no random assignment of participants to groups. Each group was composed of thirty participants. Information was collected from a test on critical thinking skills, a questionnaire on media bias, a self-evaluation on critical thinking and from treatment sessions applied to the experimental group.
The results of the first research question revealed there was no significant relation between critical thinking skills and reading comprehension. The second research question regarding the training in critical thinking skills to favor or not the ability to identify media bias in written press showed little changes with little improvement in the mean of both groups. Also, there was no significant improvement in students’ ability to identify media bias regarding the variable “time”. On the other hand, in the interaction of “time” and “group” there was no significance either. There was a minimal difference in the groups in both tests, as well as in the two times the test was taken by both groups. Furthermore, mistakes in grammar, syntactic and semantics, as well as the continuous use of dictionaries, revealed low attention in students and scarce critical thinking skills.
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