Skopje, 27 June 2024 – The Agency for Audio and Audiovisual Media Services today held its second Public Meeting this year, which included the launch of the Media Literacy Survey among First- and Second-Year High-School Students, available in the Macedonian, English и Albanian languages.
The purpose of the Survey was to make a targeted assessment of the state of play among youth in this area, more precisely to delve into the students’ opinions, habits and perceptions, focusing on their ability to understand media messages that are transmitted daily through various media and information channels.
As Director Zoran Trajchevski pointed out, with this Survey, AVMU has provided relevant data that may be used in all subsequent reform efforts, because it was done on a representative sample of all the students who had enrolled in the first and second years of secondary education in the previous school year, both in the grammar high schools and in the vocational schools. Apart from providing general data on the high school students from the first two years, this research also provides individual data on the grammar high school students and the vocational high school students whereever there are specificities, and offers conclusions and recommendations.
Dejan Dokuzovski of the USAID’s “YouThink” media literacy project, implemented by IREX, the Macedonian Media Institute, the Institute for Communication Studies and the Youth Educational Forum, spoke about the significance of the Survey. He underlined that he expected media literacy to become part of the secondary education curriculum in the country.
As pointed out by Sofia Ristova of the “Rating Agency”, which had conducted the survey for the AVMU’s needs, the Survey covered over 884 respondents from 40 secondary schools in 19 municipalities, and analyzed in detail, among other things, the use of electronic equipment on the students’ part, their recognition of contents and their critical thinking about information obtained through television and the Internet, as well as through the most frequently used social networks.
In the second part of the meeting, AVMU Director Zoran Trajchevski presented an overview of the activities carried out in accordance with the Annual Work Programme for the past three months.
Those present had the opportunity to hear about the activities related to the supervisions conducted over the broadcasters, the operators of public electronic communication networks, the print media publishers, the providers of on-demand AVM services, the public warning measures imposed, as well as the activities in the field of international cooperation, analyses and researches that had been carried out.