Designed as a handbook, this text provides media, speech (public speaking, interpersonal, small group, and organizational communication), and theatre educators with both the theoretical and practical ammunition to fight the assessment battles on their campuses. The philosophical implications of accountability are balanced with concrete, specific, and usable assessment strategies. Stressing student, faculty, course, program, department, and institutional assessment, this book's aim is to provide, in one place, information that will help diverse and complex communication programs face the growing challenges in assessment. The book is divided into three sections: background and foundational information for assessment; broad assessment strategies that apply to a variety of media, "speech," and theatre courses and programs; and context-specific assessment strategies. While covering a host of topics, it: * provides an overview of assessment and suggests how it might impact communication education, * discusses the elements of program assessment and how linkage of mission statements with outcomes can lead to strong, innovative programs, * compares and contrasts regional association requirements and presents a specific how-to strategy for writing outcome statements, * discusses teaching evaluation and argues that we need to identify the "what" of teaching before we try to measure the "how," * looks at creative ways for formative and summative course evaluation that starts with the creation of an explicit syllabus, * discusses the use of capstone courses as a way of evaluating not only their major but also how students have integrated their "total" educational experience, * suggests the variety of ways that interpersonal communication can be assessed and calls for future research that stresses the "knowledge" component of learning, * reports on a strategy for developing small group communication assessment measures, and * provides media, speech, and theatre faculty and administrators with the background, understanding and tools to build stonger programs and develop better courses and educational experiences for their students.

The chapters in this component of Assessing Media Education are valuable for those who need to know how to develop an assessment plan.

The understanding of communication refers to canonical schemes from technologies to decisions on where, how, and why the semic act gains or is at risk; to hypotheses and limits; and to normal and unconventional exchanges of senses, despite the confrontations between codes, coding, and decoding. In this book, communication is defined as concept, skill, potential, behavior, mechanism, category of exchange, phenomenon, tool, and variable. This sophisticated view differs from previous studies and assumes the multiple systems of systems and meanings generated by various fieldworks that require/reclaim their primacy over communication. Basic Communication and Assessment Prerequisites for the New Normal of Education discusses the rivalry paradigms, ambiguities, new meanings, and mechanisms of the crossroad between communication and assessment. This book makes an inventory of developments in the area as well as analyzes new edumetrics and psychometrics and inserts new best practices. This involves creating new conversational networks of global best practices and metaparadigms in order to solve current disparities and unsolved problems from the fieldwork. Covering topics such as chronic conditions, online educational environments, and self-assessment competencies, this text is ideal for teachers, parents, students, trainers, decision makers, researchers, and academicians.

The chapters included in this component of Assessing Media Education are intended for those who have already developed an assessment plan and identified key student learning outcomes, and who need more information on how to measure the outcomes both indirectly and directly.

Assessing media education is a formidable task because both assessment and media education are complex and controversial concepts. Assessment, which can take place at the individual student, class, sequence, program, department or unit, and university levels, is questioned in terms of reliability, validity, relevance, and cost. Media education, which has been challenged at a number of schools, finds faculty and administrators in the midst of soul-searching about how to clearly articulate its missions and purposes to a broader audience. Departments are under increasing national, state, and institutional pressure to get assessment procedures carried out quickly, but there is an obvious danger in rushing to implement assessment strategies before establishing what is essential in media education. In communication education in general, the "what" of assessment is often discussed in terms of skills, attitudes, affect, values, and knowledge. People assess students to determine what they know, think, feel, value, and can do. Here it is suggested that one of the places to start defining what students should learn from their media education is by identifying outcomes. Outcomes can be assessed in a variety of ways, but first they need to be developed and clearly articulated.

This photocopiable resource offers a framework for the assessment and measurement of the communication skills of children with autistic spectrum disorders. With assessment and planning sheets, it enables teachers, educators and other professionals to observe and record how children use and understand language, following their progress over time.