Studying the Effects of Sender Awareness Lessons on University Students' Internet News Evaluation

Abstract

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of lessons on university students in which they are aware of the Internet news senders on their evaluation criteria through two practices. In this research, the word “sender” refers to not just meta-information but is considered as a clue to evaluate the information itself, similar to the term “writer” in national language education in Japan. Therefore, the lesson was designed to included a lecture in which the university students could learn about the diversity of the senders and work that would enable them to become concretely aware of the senders. In this way, they can understand that the perspectives, positions, and intentions of a wide variety of senders are reflected in the article. The hypothesis that “the practice group will be more likely than the control group to use the criteria related to the articles itself when evaluating Internet news” was formulated and tested through practice, and the results were in line with the hypothesis. In addition, the findings revealed a relationship between the practice group’s understanding of the diversity of the senders and the evaluation criteria for the article itself, which was not found in the control group.