Media literacy assessment: attempting to map the complexity

Governments and international institutions generally recognize media literacy as a major political issue. It is viewed as a positive force to encourage active citizenship and social participation, reduce socioeconomic inequalities, foster critical thinking, or stimulate creative expression. The necessity of assessing media literacy is also widely acknowledged, and even translated into legal requirements imposed on states. Yet, in practice, media literacy assessment has struggled to develop beyond pilot research projects. This presentation will seek to describe the complexity of making media literacy assessment a generalized practice. Designing and implementing media literacy assessment involves answering a cascade of questions, the answers of which correspond to epistemic or strategic choices that determine different paths to its development. This presentation will propose three such questions and provide alternative answers to highlight the depth and breadth of this issue. A first question lies in the very definition of media literacy. Different conceptions of media literacy, grounded in different theoretical and epistemological traditions (e.g. cognitive, critical-cultural, or competence-based) either support the need for media literacy assessment or call its very relevance into question. Other polar distinctions (media literacy for protection or for empowerment, instrumental vs. creative and critical, centered on the individual or on the collective) also affect the scope and nature of what is meant to be assessed. A second question concerns the motivations for assessing media literacy. I will highlight how assessing may alternatively serve different purposes. In policy making, assessments may be justified by the need to report on the media literacy levels of a population. In pedagogy, the assessment may be integrated into the practice of media education. And in research, media literacy levels may be measured to be examined as factors impacting other phenomena. Depending on these purposes, the object of assessment and the strategies for assessing it may vary wildly. Finally, a third question pertains to scalability. I will argue that the ways in which assessments can be meaningfully scaled (regionally, nationally or internationally) will vary depending on the main activity sphere (research, policy-making, and pedagogy) within which the assessment is developed, with scaling solutions ranging from the generalization of simple standardized measures to the development of adaptable, context-dependent instruments. Rather than advocating for one specific approach among the ones outlined in this presentation, I will argue that what is needed to advance media literacy assessment is the coordinated pursuit of a plurality of approaches