Assistant Professor Michael McDevitt


Assistant Professor Michael McDevitt taught Reporting of Public Affairs, Reporting 2 and Newsgathering 1. He joined the faculty in August after teaching the previous four years at the University of New Mexico.

McDevitt received a three-year grant from the Knight Foundation to study the civic involvement of high school juniors and seniors in Colorado Springs.

“My prior research on an innovative curriculum known as ‘Kids Voting’ has shown that this school intervention overcomes student apathy about citizenship,” he said.

“Through student-initiated discussion about election issues, the curriculum indirectly stimulates parents as well by increasing the likelihood that they will pay attention to campaign news and acquire political knowledge. For the Colorado Springs study, I expect to interview about 1,200 adolescent-parent pairs in the fall of 2002, 2003 and 2004.

“I will seek to trace relationships among communication behaviors – such as news media use and family discussion – and adolescents’ motivation to vote. I also hope to demonstrate that adolescent-initiated discussion about politics increases the likelihood that parents will vote.”

McDevitt also helped to design a media literacy curriculum for use in public schools.

“My students were teachers who applied ideas from this summer course to develop their own lesson plans. Advocates of media literacy believe that children and adults should become active, rather than complacent, consumers of media. Teachers can help children to appreciate why certain types of media content are potentially beneficial or harmful. Students, for instance, learn how to deconstruct ads; in doing so, they develop sophistication about techniques of persuasion,” he said. Michael.McDevitt@Colorado.edu