Measuring media literacy

“Media literacy may be defined broadly as an individual’s capacity to interpret autonomously and critically the flow, substance, value and consequence of media in all its many forms.” (Celot, P & Tornero, J. 2009).

Since I have started to research this area I have become very aware of the debates surrounding the various forms of literacy, and indeed if we should identify them as different at all. I don’t want to add to this discussion at this stage, but am interested in how our students are working with media sources. I think we can safely assume this to be termed media literacy.

Developing media literacy in our students is not a new concept in schools, but I am increasingly aware that we could be doing much more in this area. How do your students interpret what they encounter in the media? What could you to help them with this?

At #lwf11 Jimmy Wales mentioned teaching students to understand and interpret media sources as being the most important thing we could be doing. This got me thinking. How well do our students do this already, and what simple changes could we introduce to the curriculum to enhance it?

I’ve started by trying to establish exactly what media literacy is. The quote above seems to be the most concise description but there is massive room for debate on a precise definition. In “The seven great debates in the media literacy movement” Hobbs lays out just some of the problems facing educators in trying to work in this area. I’m not going into detail on that here, but if you teach in a related area it is really worth getting hold of a copy of this.

The UK film council state that media literate people should be able to:

• Use media technologies effectively to access, store, retrieve and share content to meet their individual and community needs and interests;
• Gain access to, and make informed choices about, a wide range of media forms and content from different cultural and institutional sources;
• Understand how and why media content is produced;
• Analyse critically the techniques, languages and conventions used by the media, and the messages they convey;
• Use media creatively to express and communicate ideas, information and opinions;
• Identify, and avoid or challenge, media content and services that may be unsolicited, offensive or harmful;
• Make effective use of media in the exercise of their democratic rights and civic responsibilities.

Before we can start to introduce activities to improve media literacy I wanted to try and measure what level we are currently working at. A 2009 EU paper set out to measure media literacy levels in Europe, so this seems like a good starting point. In the graphic below (taken from this report), the area I want to focus on is the individual competences.

This division suggests we divide our work into two key areas, use of the media and critical understanding. Elsewhere in the report communication abilities are also highlighted as key but I think this will be part and parcel of working with students on the other two areas. Ofcom neatly split this fairly intimidating concept up into “access, understand, create”. Simple and accessible terms that I would like to try and follow.

To establish a level of media literacy we need to look at students use of media, technical skills, and their understanding/analysis of it. Working with a small trial group of year 9 students, the following survey has been put together to measure a baseline. It borrows ideas from the EU document mentioned, and recent Ofcom studies on media literacy in the UK. It is something of a balance between time & detail, but covers the areas discussed above. For now, consider it a work in progress but this is very much where I am headed.

The next stage of the process will be to look at introducing new activities into media lessons to develop media literacy, more on this to follow later in the term. As always, interested in your thoughts/comments/corrections on the subject.