Development of Digital Media Literacy Performance Assessments for Educators

• In Event: Teacher Formation and Practice in Democratic Citizenship Education

Abstract

Digital media literacy skills are critical components of informed digital citizenship. However, people struggle to identify reliable sources of information (McGrew, 2018). To address this need, we designed a massive open online course (MOOC) where teachers learned to teach digital media literacy (DML) skills. We piloted a performance pre-assessment with three tasks in this MOOC to measure participants’ ability to evaluate student reasoning on DML tasks. We found that participants struggled with rejecting misinformation and providing evidence for why a source was unreliable. We present these tasks as a method of assessing educators’ pedagogical content knowledge for DML.

Authors

• G.R. Marvez, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Joshua Littenberg-Tobias, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Aria Eppinger

• Sydney Dell

• Teresa Elena Ortega, Stanford University

• Joel Breakstone, Stanford University

• Sam Wineburg, Stanford University

• Justin F. Reich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology