Media Effects on Positive and Negative Learning

While educational science in the past mainly focused on students’ formal or intentional learning from courses, textbooks, or online tutorials in university contexts, communication science usually deals with ordinary citizens’ informal or unintentional learning from the mass media in everyday life. One of the general aims of the PLATO project is to bring these research traditions together. Therefore, this paper sums up research on media effects on positive and negative learning recently conducted; our studies show that media coverage is often biased and news media, therefore, contribute to negative as well as positive learning. Which kind of learning occurs, heavily depends on the way information is presented.