Assessing Media and Information Literacy: Teenagers’ Practices and Competence in Information Search and Multimedia Creation
(2021) 7th European Conference on Information Literacy, ECIL 2021 — Location: Bamberg, Germany / Online (20.September.2021)
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- Authors
Sutter Widmer, Denise 
Lacelle, Nathalie Gladu, Eve
- Abstract
- In this presentation, we introduce the theoretical framework, methodological design and first results of an international study (2018-2022) on the assessment of teenagers’ Media and Information Literacy (MIL) in online information search and multimedia creation, in French-speaking Belgium, Québec, France and Switzerland. We consider MIL as a set of competences. Competences exceed the mere mastery of knowledge and skills, and involve selecting and combining relevant knowledge and skills “to adapt oneself to novel situations in new and non-stereotypical ways” (Rey et al., 2012, p. 13). Our research aims at producing a unified conceptual and methodological framework to study the relationship between MIL as competences, the knowledge and skills these competences call upon, and media and information practices. We draw on prior theoretical work to distinguish between the semiotic, technical and social dimensions (Fastrez, 2010) of MIL, and to highlight its multimodal nature (Lacelle et al., 2017). Our methodological design starts from the definition of a complex task requiring students to be competent at creating an explanatory hypertext (i.e. a website) detailing the results of an extensive web search. This complex task is decomposed into simpler tasks, each calling for a specific piece of knowledge or a specific skill potentially useful in the complex task. The complex task and the simple tasks are converted into both survey questionnaire items (yielding self-assessed competence, knowledge and skill levels) and test task instructions and questions (yielding performance-based assessment data). Each task also corresponds to survey items on its associated media and information practices. In the first data collection phase of our project (2019-2020), a large sample of lower secondary education students (i.e. 13-15 year-olds; N~2000 in each participating country) completes a questionnaire on their self-reported practices and self-assessed competences, knowledge and skills related to information search and multimedia creation. In the second data collection phase (2020-2021), a smaller sample of the same age range will complete the same survey, as well as a test including our complex task and simple tasks. A subsample of respondents will participate in qualitative interviews on the strategies they used to complete the complex task, as well as on their information search and multimedia creation practices. Data collection for the first phase was completed in Belgium in May 2019, and will be completed in Québec, France and Switzerland in May 2020. Based on this dataset, our presentation will explore the relationship between the self-assessed competences, knowledge and skills, and declared practices of the participants in information search and multimedia creation. Notably, results from the Belgian sample indicate that students’ self-assessments differ dramatically between global competences and specific skills: they are less confident in their specific search skills than in their overall search competences, but more confident in their specific production skills than in their overall production competences. We conclude by highlighting how our conceptual framework and methodological design support the integrated analysis of self-reported as well as measured levels of teenagers’ MIL overall competences, specific knowledge and skills, and associated habitual media and information practices, as well as the relationship between these different phenomena. Finally, we identify both didactical and pedagogical implications of our research for the development of MIL educational practices.
- Affiliations
Citations
Fastrez, P., Sutter Widmer, D., Bihl, J., Lacelle, N., & Gladu, E. (2021). Assessing Media and Information Literacy: Teenagers’ Practices and Competence in Information Search and Multimedia Creation. 7th European Conference on Information Literacy, ECIL 2021, Bamberg, Germany / Online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269101