Assessing Social Media Competences With Card Sorts
(2012) Media Education Summit 2012 — Location: Bournemouth (UK) (11.September.2012)
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- Abstract
- As media education developed into a vivid field of activity, there is a growing need for systematic research on standardised methods for the evaluation of media literacy competences (Buckingham, 2005; Hobbs, 2010; Livingstone, 2005). In this contribution, we introduce an assessment method for media literacy social competences. We developed and tested a method for assessing people’s ability to categorise media messages in a variety of ways relating to their social dimension (e.g. their private vs. public nature, author, potential effect, etc.), in the context of online social networks. Our method relies on a card sorting task (Fastrez et al., 2009; Rugg & McGeorge, 2005, Spencer, 2009), requiring subjects to group cards into piles based on their similarity, according to criteria of their choice. Our test material includes four different card sets, each card picturing a snippet from a Facebook profile or page corresponding to (1) representations of self, (2) representations of others, (3) communities, and (4) interface components (Georges, 2010). In a pilot experiment designed to validate the method, ten Facebook users were asked to sort these card sets repeatedly, using a single criterion at a time, until they ran out of criteria. The subjects produced a total of 272 sorts. We combined qualitative analysis, focused on the nature of sorts, their variety and internal coherence, with quantitative analysis measuring the number, breadth and orthogonality (Fossum & Haller, 2005) of sorts produced by each subject. Results show that the card sort technique can be used to discriminate between different subject profiles that can be ranked in terms of competence level. In our sample, this competence level was not correlated with the subjects’ quality of access to digital media (Schradie, 2011), nor to their level of engagement with social media (Ito et al., 2009). This exploratory research contributes to the development of methodological tools that can serve both for the assessment of the media literacy level of individuals, and for the evaluation of the efficiency of media education programmes.
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Jacques, J., & Fastrez, P. (2012). Assessing Social Media Competences With Card Sorts. Media Education Summit 2012, Bournemouth (UK). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/25141