Currently, she is co-principal investigator of a project, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Public Health, which explores the conditions under which Latinos in North Philadelphia critically analyze print tobacco advertising, TV public service announcements and tobacco product placement in movies. 

She is also developing an online multimedia learning environment to introduce media literacy to adolescent girls, ages 9 - 14, in a project funded by the Office on Women's Health (HHS).

Hobbs is also conducting longitudinal research on students at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, to examine the impact of media literacy education on students' academic performance, family communication and civic engagement.

Over more than 20 years in the field, she has helped bring media literacy education to thousands of students in the United States through her collaborative work with state education agencies and media companies.  Her work with Maryland State Department of Education and the Discovery Channel led to the development of Assignment:  Media Literacy, a comprehensive K-12 media literacy curriculum and staff development program that has reached 2,700 teachers in the State of Maryland.  In 2003, her curriculum, Viewing and Representing in Texas, based on the Maryland project, enables the Texas Education Agency, with support from the Texas Cable and Telecommunication Association, to provide the first statewide training of large numbers of secondary English teachers all across Texas.  Her video on media literacy, Tuning in to Media, received a Parent's Choice Award and her curriculum on analyzing the documentary genre, KNOW TV, received the Golden Cable ACE Award in 1994.

Hobbs co-authored the first secondary language arts textbook to incorporate media literacy concepts and activities, Elements of Language (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 2000).  She has published articles in scholarly and professional publications and has created videotapes, teacher guides, lesson plans and curriculum materials about integrating media literacy into K-12 instruction. Her research assessing the impact of media literacy on the development of students’ reading comprehension and critical thinking skills has been published in Reading Research Quarterly.  

A tenured associate professor at Temple's School of Communication and Theater, Hobbs has guided the development of media literacy education in the United States since the early 1990s, when she created the Harvard Institute in Media Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the first national-level teach education initiative for media education in the United States.  

She has developed multi-year relationships with school districts to provide staff development, curriculum design, and research services, including Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire, the Norrback Avenue School in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Taft Middle School in Boston, Massachusetts, the Dennis-Yarmouth Public Schools on Cape Cod, and Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, Maryland.

She has consulted for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), Drug Free Pennsylvania, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the New York Times Education Program, Time magazine, and others. 

She received an Ed.D from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (1985), an M.A. in Communication from the University of Michigan (1981) , and a B.A. with a double major in English Literature and Film Video Studies from the University of Michigan (1979).