Development and validation of a scale for assessing university students' new online media and reporting literacy

New media literacy is an expected competency for university students. However, few literacy scales can evaluate students' fake news reporting and checking abilities. In the past, the new media literacy framework only included Critical Consuming, Critical Prosumption, Functional Prosumption, and Functional Consuming. Therefore, this study proposes a self-assessable new online media and reporting literacy scale (NOMRL) based on the previous new media literacy framework. The NOMRL scale was developed in four phases. A literature review generated a pool of items in the first phase. Phase 2 was conducted through an expert review to confirm the validity of the content. Phase 3 was the purification of the scale in Study 1, where 243 university students participated in this survey phase. Finally, we analyzed 365 university students' responses in Study 2 and derived a factor structure using EFA while conducting a reliability assessment with CFA to test the theoretical structure. This study resulted in a 22-item scale, including two new constructs: Behavioral Consumption and Behavioral Prosumption. The scale can help college students self-assess their level of reporting-related literacy in social media. In addition to discussing the educational implications, this paper provides insights and suggestions for future research.