Survey or Test: How Should We Assess Media Literacy on a Global Scale?

Fastrez, Pierre;Tilleul, Camille
(2022) IAMCR 2022: Communication Research in the Era of Neo-Globalisation: Reorientations, Challenges and Changing Contexts — Location: Beijing, China / Online (11.July.2022)

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Abstract
While international institutions (e.g. UNESCO, EU, NATO) identify media literacy as a key for addressing a host of societal issues (fake news, cyberbullying, digital exclusion, ...), there is a surprising lack of reliable methods for assessing media literacy at a global scale. Common existing methods face several challenges. Task-based assessments of media literacy competencies are labor-intensive and difficult to scale. Surveys of self-assessed competencies have questionable validity. This presentation will draw on ongoing work in three research projects involving both types of assessment at different scales: a small scale assessment aligned with the pedagogical objectives of news literacy workshops for teenagers designed by a French school of journalism, an international assessment of information search and multimodal creation competencies of teenagers in four French-speaking countries, and the design of a media literacy module for the Global Kids Online survey. We will explore the advantages and challenges of combining declarative surveys and task-based assessments in order to advance media literacy assessment at a global scale. Strategies to combine both methods include the validation of declarative data by triangulating it with performance-based data, and the design of tasks that are adaptable to local issues, specific media contents and different cultural sensitivities, supporting the appropriation of assessment instruments by local teams of researchers or educators, hence allowing their deployment at a large scale.
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Fastrez, P., & Tilleul, C. (2022). Survey or Test: How Should We Assess Media Literacy on a Global Scale? IAMCR 2022: Communication Research in the Era of Neo-Globalisation: Reorientations, Challenges and Changing Contexts, Beijing, China / Online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/24795