The goal of this study is to identify the actual profile of Korean teenage socio-political awareness and analyze influential media, so that it may show a promising direction of social science education for a little more favorable democratic society, a...
The goal of this study is to identify the actual profile of Korean teenage socio-political awareness and analyze influential media, so that it may show a promising direction of social science education for a little more favorable democratic society, and provide a basic data available as teaching-learning program in social science.
For these sakes, this study focused on the following considerations:
First, which kinds of media provide up-to-date news and other information on current affairs for our middle schoolers?
Secondly, how much do our middle schoolers have socio-political awareness?
Thirdly, how much do news media have influence on their socio-political awareness?
To solve these questions, male and female middle schoolers(3rd grade) in Gyeongnam province were asked to join a formulated questionnaire survey hereof.
The results of survey can be outlined as follows:
First, our students had low tendency to reading or watching news media that may function as carrier to create socio-political awareness among teenage groups. By category, most students had higher tendency to meet reports or articles and social section on newspaper than anything else, followed by news available from domestic portal sites like Yahoo or Naver, reports and social section on electronic newspaper via web, on-air TV news and educational program relevant to current affairs, and cable news channel like YTN respectively. Thus, this result may be considered when the teacher in social science wants to apply these media to classwork.
Secondly, our students had advanced political awareness in general. Out of subordinate domains, their sense of responsibility for participation scored higher points than sense of political efficacy, which means that our students had very advanced sense of responsibility for participation. But their political interest reached relatively mediocre level. Of course, it was found that they had advanced social awareness and very high awareness of equality throughout subordinate domains. They had very high sense of duty and relatively high level in self-direction, law-abiding spirit, environmental mind and service mind. But they scored mediocre level in the mind of cooperation, which indicated the lowest of all subordinate domains about social minds. Hence, it is necessary that our schools provide commensal community-based democratic education for students.
Finally, there was a positive correlation between watching news media and students' socio-political awareness. As for students, the more contact with news media led to higher socio-political awareness.
Conclusively, it is prerequisite that students select reasonable news media and teachers in social science develop teaching-learning programs based on these news media, while following up relevant studies in the future.