An Invitation to Join an International Project on Assessing Critical Awareness
I am currently engaged with media educators from a number of countries in a project to develop an assessment instrument for determining the level of students' critical awareness of feature films (Worsnop, 2000). This project is based on the research of Alexander Fedorov of Taganrog University in Russia. Briefly, it uses a scale to analyze how students talk about a text, with leveled descriptions of discourse to make assessments on depth of insight.
Alex and I met a couple of times at conferences and we talked about his research, half in his halting English and half in the halting French we share. The outcome of our discussions and subsequent e-mail correspondence was that he and I, together with our colleagues Nada Korac from Yugoslavia and Judit Benyei from Hungary, undertook to conduct an experiment to test out his research, which reveals a regular pattern in the way that teens respond to feature films. Federov has established “levels” of depth of perception, or critical insight, based on his analysis of teens' responses. You will find this reported at his Web site.
What I have undertaken is to try to turn his research observations into a scale or rubric for assessing depth of perception or critical insight (within the definitions of Federov's work), providing it as a model for others to use as a filter for observing students' responses.
Now, the four of us are going to test out the usefulness of the rubric by conducting a common experiment or project. (I am careful to avoid calling this activity “research.”) Each of us is to find a class of 16-year-olds who will view a feature film (we are considering Frantic by Roman Polanski). After the screening we will conduct interviews (which we will videorecord) with groups of students. We are also contemplating administering a structured questionnaire, but the interview itself is intended to be fairly unstructured and will avoid use of leading questions. We want to know how the students respond spontaneously.
Each of us will then proceed to analyze the interviews using the rubric. The intention is to find out information about the rubric, rather than about the individual students. Later we hope to extend the project by analyzing the differences between the spontaneous feedback from the interviews and the elicited feedback from the questionnaire. Then we want to develop a set of classroom approaches based on the information in the rubric. Teachers will be able to use these approaches to try to nudge students from their current level of operation to the next highest one. Our time lines are very tight, and we may end up lengthening them. We are also aware of a number of limitations and problems in our design. Still, we think it will be worthwhile to proceed and to report on our successes, limited as they may be, as we go along.
The project will almost certainly be another year in development before a report will be ready, but I presented an interim report at the Summit 2000: Children, Youth and the Media Beyond the Millennium conference in Toronto in May 2000.
We would welcome the participation of any secondary school media education teachers in any country who might be interested in offering their class of 16-year-olds to be involved in the ongoing work of this project. Please e-mail me for details of what is needed.
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232