Evaluating Media Literacy and Media Education Competences of Future Media Educators

In September 2013, the IHECS Brussels School of journalism and communication launched a new two-year Master’s program (120 ECTS credits) in Applied Communication, specializing in Media Education. It aims to train professional media educators. The design and inception of this master program are monitored by a scientific committee created to optimize it. One of the key components of the scientific committee’s work is the overall evaluation of the Master’s program, which includes the diachronic assessment of the first cohort of students’ media literacy and media education competences. The overall assessment will include three steps, as students will be tested three times in total: once at the outset of their Master’s program, once at the end of their first year of training, and once at the end of their Master’s program (i.e. at the end of the second year of training). In this paper, the authors present the assessment’s theoretical framework and method, as well as the results of the first test. It appears that the thirteen incoming students have the highest levels of competence in reading media, in terms of the information they carry, and the lowest when asked to analyse and classify media according to technical criteria