Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

To empower the public with media literacy and critical thinking skills helps increase the awareness of fake news and identify them. The goals of this study are to design a gamification mechanism applied to all kinds of news website for the public, to enhance their media literacy and critical thinking skills, and therefore to help the public identify fake news. In order to motivate the public to train themselves and to practice the learned skills in everyday life, this study borrowed the concept “meaningful gamification” and designed a gamified platform to assist the teaching and to promote self-training for the general public. Some gaming elements including goals, challenges and quests, progress, feedback, competition and cooperation, actual grading, visible status, access/unlocking content, freedom of choice, freedom to fail, storytelling, new identities, and roles were employed in this gamified platform. The media literacy and awareness of fake news scale (MLAFN) is being developed by this study. The scale and the Critical Thinking Test LevelⅡ(CTT-Ⅱ) are employed in this study. Participants were recruited from the college and joined the experiment for five weeks. A pretest-posttest control group design was employed. Repeated measure analysis of variance and structured interviews was employed for the analysis of the effectiveness of the gaming mechanism. This study will contribute to the enhancement of media literacy and critical thinking skills of the public and can help raise the awareness of fake news and sharpen skills to identify it.