Using Media Production as a Lever for Critical Source Evaluation

• In Event: Learning From Others: Advancing Theory and Research on Learning From Sources

Abstract

The phrase "scientific literacy" has been defined in so many ways that educators have cause to worry whether it has any meaning at all, but certainly one of the aims for science education is that it enables people to evaluate sources of information about scientific topics relevant to their own everyday activity. As people encounter science outside of school according to their own interests and needs, that science often is beyond what they may have learned in school. This demands laypeople to be able to act as "competent outsiders" (Feinstein, 2011), relying more on a functional understanding of scientific practice than on specific science concepts (Ryder, 2001). Yet, most research on students' understanding of the nature of science relies on assessment of (typically naïve) beliefs about a distal science rather than people's efforts to make sense of scientific claims for themselves (Sandoval, 2005). Similarly, research on epistemological beliefs more generally tends to examine what are presumed to be stable beliefs through assessments removed from meaningful contexts (DeBacker, Crowson, Beesley, Thoma, & Hestevold, 2008). Such approaches reveal little about how people actually engage in epistemic cognition as they try to make sense of knowledge claims in personally meaningful activity. We take a situated approach to the study of epistemic cognition and epistemological development, an approach that requires triangulation among the practices of knowledge construction and evaluation in which people actually engage, the artifacts produced from such practice, and people's reflections on such artifacts and their own activity.

The present study pursued this situated approach through an effort to understand high school students' strategies of source evaluation in the context of producing their own documentaries on a topic of personal interest. The setting for our study was a six-week media literacy and movie making class for high school students at a local state university. We designed a curriculum around the structure of a media story, highlighting rhetorical (e.g. representation, persuasion, power, and relevance) and narrative (e.g. camera angles, symbolism, empathic anchors, and verbal-visual-discontinuities) elements. As students pursued their topics, they explored a wide array of sources of information potentially useful for their documentaries. We designed activities during the course that demanded students explain their source choices, to promote them to think critically about how story elements are used to align purportedly objective information with particular agendas. We observed students as they worked through the course, we analyzed the movies themselves, and curricular activities that led students to reflect on aspects of their work. We found that the task of creating a documentary film highlighted students’ emerging understanding of bias in the media, and structured their evaluation of theirs and others’ opinions on the science topic. Within the complex epistemic space of evaluating disagreements between public and private sources, students reconciled these differences in different ways from each other and inconsistently across different activities. These inconsistencies support a view of epistemic cognition as situated. They also show the value of personally relevant knowledge construction opportunities for bringing often tacit epistemic resources to light.

Authors

• Jarod N. Kawasaki, University of California - Los Angeles

• David DeLiema, University of California - Los Angeles

• William A. Sandoval, University of California - Los Angeles