My Work in Media Education Assessment

When I retired in 1995, I promised myself that I would try to devote time to media education. Ever since my undergraduate years -- when I looked for justification for going to the movies seven times a week -- and later when I began filling my basement with 8 and 16 millimeter films and then VHS copies of my favorite movies, I had wanted to explore that area more deeply.

cover of Assessing Media WorkJust days into my retirement, I decided to write Assessing Media Work: Authentic Assessment in Media Education (Worsnop, 1996b). The previous year I had published the first edition of Screening Images: Ideas for Media Education (Worsnop, 1994b), which covered theory and practice but not assessment (except for a few black-line masters in the final pages). I believed that one reason teachers were shy of media education was that they were unsure about assessing work that students might produce in formats such as video, audio, posters, story boards, photo stories, and so on. I also wanted to try to organize all I had learned about assessment over the years into a book.

At the center of Assessing Media Work is a rubric that derives largely from my earlier experiences in assessing writing and creating scales for writing assessment. In developing the rubric, I assumed that all human expression shares the components of writing, namely

Also from my experience with writing assessment, I imported a preference for analytical, detailed scales over holistic ones, believing that detail guides teachers and students toward better practice and performance and enhances reliability. I developed the scale on five levels -- despite the fact that Ontario had switched to a four-level scale -- because of my conviction that an odd number of levels is preferable since it provides a center (and also because five is the most common number of levels used in scales). I applied all that Judith Fine had taught me about the importance of carefully separating the levels with language that clearly and evenly differentiated one from another. I made every effort to limit the scale to the description of the actual work rather than to any process that the work represented, or to any internal state of the work's creator that an assessor might believe he or she could perceive. I knew I wanted teachers who used the scale to share it with their students as part of “making the rules clear,” so I planned the book as something that could be sold with a license for duplication within a school building. I developed separate assessment instruments for purposes that fell outside the realm of the major scale -- for assessing personal response to a media text, for instance -- and I included a number of forms for record keeping, diagnostic, and self-, peer, and formative assessment uses.

From the beginning I was aware that Assessing Media Work would be incomplete in one important way: it would not offer the anchor pieces that teachers prefer to have as models for assessment. The development of anchors for media education assessment would be an enormous task since samples in every imaginable format (video, poster, etc.) that students might use at every grade level would be required. Also, different sets of anchors would be needed at each grade level, depending on how many years of media study students had already completed. There is an enormous difference between this and providing anchors for writing assessment, where only a single set of papers at each grade level (with perhaps some flexibility worked in for different genres) is required.

Nevertheless, I have embarked on creating a set of anchors, and I continue to seek help from media teachers around the world who provide me with video work from their classes. A Web site I first put up in 1988 includes a discussion forum where I hope visitors will contribute their thoughts. But progress is slow. In truth, although I can commit the time, sufficient funding is difficult to secure.

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Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232