Abstract
Even though the frequency of children watching TV on their own is on the rise, unmonitored TV observation often leads to misinterpretation of content, caused by a restricted value judgment. For children to better understand TV content, a parent should accompany the child and mediate. In this study, a group of parents with 6^<th> grade children were presented a lecture on media literacy, then encouraged to mediate as their child watched TV. A scale to measure a child's ability to interpret news broadcasts critically, or "critical thinking towards news", was created, in order to assess the change in the effectiveness of parental mediation before and after the lecture. Although no significant change was observed from this experiment, evaluation of the survey conducted before conducting the experiment revealed there was indeed a correlation between the availability of parental mediation and a child's critical thinking abilities. That is to say, children in households where parents more regularly mediate as the child watches TV demonstrated more ability to implement critical thinking in interpreting news broadcasts.
