Outstanding Issues, Needed Research, and Implications for Practice
My interest in assessment in media education promises to keep me occupied for a long time to come. There is plenty of work to do to improve assessment in general and to address the following important issues in media education assessment.
1. Writing as the means of assessment
One of the biggest bugaboos of assessment is the tendency to rely on writing as the medium of reporting, and on the essay as the format. In both Screening Images and Assessing Media Work I include a list of 186 ways a student could report on learning other than through an essay. While I do think that the essay, or a variety of essay, is probably a useful way of assessing important elements of interpreting media, I must point out that it is not the only available or useful tool.
Even when it is sensible and necessary to assess some part of media education learning through writing, the essay is only occasionally the best format to use. Although the “op ed” and the editorial are variants of the essay, both are superior to the traditional “school” essay as measures of media learning because they are themselves common media formats -- perhaps the dominant versions of the essay among writers today. The school essay, on the other hand, is intended to measure not only how well students can report about having learned something, but also to demonstrate how well they have mastered the dominant academic rhetorical form.
Beyond writing, such things as student-made videos, for instance, are capable of reporting learning in ways that provide information not available at all in an essay. Video's ability to carry images, sound, rhythm, pace, color, distance or closeness, time, and point of view can be considered as value added to the pseudo-essay of the voice-over. What's more, a successful video is a demonstration of skills other than those used in oral language and writing, many of which need to be practiced collaboratively rather than in isolation. A little more analysis will make it clear that the ability to bring all the skills of video making together in a group project is an indication of a number of other social and synthetic skills that would warm the hearts of Piaget and Bloom.
The reason many teachers give for not allowing students to work in formats other than the tried-and-true essay is that they -- the teachers -- do not feel comfortable or qualified in assessing work that comes to them in other formats. (It was to answer that anxiety that I wrote Assessing Media Work.) Insistence that students restrict themselves to essay writing in the assessment of their media learning is also sometimes found in conjunction with a view of media as a second-rate substitute for books. Together they display an approach to media education that can be called “print snobbery.”
I do not want to argue that students should not learn how to write academic essays. I do want to argue that their success or failure in media education ought not to depend on their facility in a kind of rhetoric that is not part of the subject under study. The serious media education teacher needs to ask this question: Should it be possible for students to do well in this course if they are good at media education but weak at writing? Clearly, my own answer to this question is a resounding yes!
Needed research and implications for practice
Studies are needed to test whether students learn as well in courses where writing is not a major component of their assessment. Such studies should be conducted not only in media education classes but in other subject areas as well, as an investigation of whether writing requirements might actually serve as a deterrent to learning (or to the demonstration of learning) in some subject areas, or for some learners.
Teachers could conduct their own action research projects in which they teach a unit or a class in different ways, requiring students to report on their learning in various formats or in a format of their choice. The control assessment measure in all instances could be an oral interview at the end of the course or unit, in which students demonstrate their understanding of course concepts orally, using any other supports they choose.
2. Measuring student media products against professional products
In my workshops I often show samples of student-made media that I have collected from colleagues in many countries. I have sometimes been shocked to find that some of the workshop participants assess the student work against a yardstick of professionally produced materials. I have seen student documentaries criticized (and thus in some sense assessed at a low level) because they were not up to the standard of editing and pacing of the best available on television. I have seen student dramas criticized because the script or music was not up to Hollywood standards (as if that was the highest standard to achieve).
My belief is that student materials should be assessed against a standard of what is possible for the best student materials to achieve under the same circumstances of creation as those in place for the piece being assessed. By this I mean that assessment of a student piece made with an inexpensive camera and no editing facilities should take into account the limitations of its creation. I have seen plenty of poor work that was completed with very sophisticated equipment.
Needed research and implications for practice
The chief resource needed here is a set of anchors. Teachers assessing writing have access to banks of writing samples that exemplify performance at different levels. Teachers need access to the same sort of resource for other kinds of media. Video and audio are the logical places to begin, but the task of assembling anchors is enormous. Here modern technology and the Internet should make the task somewhat easier, and should also make available a range of international samples. I have already made a very modest beginning by collecting samples of student-made video from teachers in a few countries, and would welcome contacts from teachers interested in providing further samples. The project, however, will remain informal and of limited use unless it can find more energy and resources than my own. In an ideal situation it would be funded long term by a university or corporate partner.
3. If you can list it, it exists and it is important
The fact that we can make a list of characteristics, skills, requirements, or standards sometimes gives the list itself an authority greater than it deserves. It is important in all assessment -- not just in media education -- to make allowances for thinking and performing “outside the box,” otherwise we run the risk of squelching the extraordinary, disadvantaging the different, and disempowering the unfamiliar. The very best evidence of learning sometimes comes in a form and fashion that we cannot possibly anticipate in even the most comprehensive provincial, state, or national assessment. We must avoid the hubris of believing our plans and schemes are all encompassing, finished, or perfect.
Needed research and implications for practice
I have already noted how important it is for classrooms to incorporate good performance tasks into the work that students are required to do. Researchers should study the impact of such practices on the overall performance of all students. It would be interesting to see if such tasks not only improve academic learning but also lead to classrooms that encourage better attendance, have fewer discipline problems, create improved teacher-student relationships, and suffer less thievery and vandalism.
4. International studies
We need to avoid parochialism and pay respectful attention to what is happening worldwide. In the United Kingdom, for instance, there is a tremendous store of experience in media as a secondary school subject. There are numerous international researchers who have published works using case study methodology, discourse analysis, and demographic and action research approaches as tools of investigating how people experience media (see, e.g., Barker & Brooks, 1998; Buckingham, 1996; Hart, 1998; Prinsloo & Criticos, 1991; and von Feilitzen & Carlsson, 1998, 1999).
In some countries, including Spain, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil, media education is seen as a defense against a return to authoritarian government -- literally a bulwark of democracy. Assessment in those countries takes on a different style and function than it does for those of us who take democratic systems for granted. Realizing how those countries stress the empowerment of the individual and an understanding of the political system through media education is not something we can afford to ignore, but something we can use to expand our vision of media education and assessment.
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232