By Chris Worsnop

So you've got some media work from your class. Now what?

One of the dreariest things about modern education is that it still asks students to do their work in formats that originated in earlier decades, if not earlier centuries. We teach things like computer technology, and assess how well students have learned it by asking them to write an essay. This is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with essays, or with writing them; it is merely a plea for students to be allowed to use some more modern, alternative forms to report their learning. In my 1994 book, Screening Images: Ideas for Media Education, there is a five-column list (pages 60 & 61) of suggested alternatives: 186 in all.

I suspect that one reason teachers hesitate to encourage students to report to them in, say, a video format, is that the teachers feel unqualified to assess work that is not presented in traditional written genres. Fair game! What we don't know how to assess we are likely to assess poorly; and nobody willingly puts himself or herself in a position of doing a poor job.

Supposing we were able, though, to provide teachers with assessment instruments that would give them the confidence to remove restrictions on reporting format. Would that be enough to change things? I think it's worth a try.

In my book Assessing Media Work I give teachers assessment instruments to use with confidence in passing judgment on any expressive work students present to them.

All forms of expression have certain things in common.

• They all have content: ideas and details
  
  
• They all are organized in some way
  
  
• They all use (or do not use) a form of effective (media) language
  
  
• They all display (or fail to display) an author's voice and awareness of audience
  
  
• They all demonstrate a degree of technical competence

These five traits - ideas and content, organization, effective expression, voice/audience, technical competence - are universal to all forms of expression and can be described carefully in assessment instruments, using language that describes the difference between good performance and weak performance. These scaled descriptions of levels of performance are referred to as rubrics.

Lots of work has already been done in developing rubrics for assessing student writing, and I have personally been connected with three such major projects over the past four years.

A set of rubrics for assessing media work will help all teachers - not just those in media education - in assessing their students' expressive work in video, audio, illustration, music, script or design with instruments that are valid, reliable, authentic and fair.

The rubrics in Assessing Media Work are:

• detailed enough to ensure that reliability is high, and that the information students and teachers derive from the assessments is helpful and diagnostic
  
  
• general enough that they can be used with many kinds of student expression
  
  
• adaptable to local conditions and standards, with provision for teachers to suspend parts of the rubric, add emphasis or weight to parts of the rubric, or add new sections
  
  
• accessible, with training, to teachers, students and parents because of straightforward language and organization
  
  
• useful for assessment, instruction and reporting

Here is an example of a rubric written to assess student response to a text. The text could be writing, video, music, cartoon, photograph, drawing, script, etc. The response could likewise be in any medium of format.

Assessment Scale For Response To Media

Level 6	The student integrates personal feelings, experiences, hopes, fears, reflections or beliefs with the text. The personal response is rooted in the text, a clear understanding of the whole text and its subtext(s), and makes connections to other texts.
Level 5	The student connects personal feelings, experiences, hopes, fears, reflections or beliefs with the text. The personal response refers to the text, conveys a sense of understanding of the text and partial understanding of its subtext.
Level 4	The student explores personal feelings, experiences, hopes, fears, reflections or beliefs making only a superficial connection to the text.
Level 3	The student retells or paraphrases the text or identifies devices in isolation, making only a superficial reference to personal feelings or experiences.
Level 2	The student response shows little or no interaction with, or commitment to, the text. The personal response may be weak, unconnected to the text, or absent.
Level 1	The student response is irrelevant, incomprehensible or blank.

This is an example of a holistic rubric. It is holistic because it deals generally with the work as a whole rather than in detail with various separate aspects of it. It is a rubric because it uses a scale of six levels to separate various kinds of student response.

The six level scale operates as outlined below:

Each individual level of performance can be further described.

A teacher faced with a student response, whatever its format or medium, would be able to apply the descriptors of the six levels to decide what was the best match between the descriptors and the work: what level the work should be assigned to.

It is worth noting that assigning a level on a defined scale is different in a number of ways from assigning a mark or a letter grade.

The level assigned:

• stands for a set of defined descriptors which are shared between the teacher and the student
  
  
• automatically tells the student which descriptors are best suited to define the work
  
  
• tells the student which levels and descriptors have already been achieved or passed on the scale
  
  
• tells the teacher and the student which descriptors are important to strive for in future
  
  
• contains real information about the work rather than only a numerical or grade evaluation
  
  
• is useful for the teacher as diagnostic information for planning instruction
  
  
• has the same meaning each time it is assigned

Let's go back now to the five traits common to all expression:

• ideas and content
  
  
• organization
  
  
• effective use of (media) language
  
  
• voice/audience
  
  
• technical competence

It would be a rewarding task to develop a rubric to describe six levels of performance in each of these traits - or even better, in various sub-aspects of each trait. Then teachers would be able to do multiple-trait assessment on student work, enhancing many times over all the advantages of rubric assessment.

Let's take the first trait, ideas and content. The sub-aspects of this trait could be:

• controlling idea
  
  
• supporting information and detail
  
  
• development

Each of these sub-aspects can be scaled or described at each of the six levels of performance. For instance, the first one - controlling idea - looks like this:

Controlling Idea

Developing the remaining four traits with their sub-aspects in the same way will create a detailed rubric to enable teachers to confidently assess any and all traits with any form of expressive student work.

Assessing Media Work contains the full rubrics for all five traits, as well as training suggestions and warnings about possible pitfalls in assessing with rubrics - which this short article can not include, except to say that the rubric for assessing media work can assess only the students' performance. It can not be used to infer any information about the students' ability, motivation, process of working or any other abstraction or inner state that is not directly available in the text itself. Different instruments are needed for this kind of assessment. Examples of such instruments appear in Assessing Media Work.