Assessing Journalistic Potential with Performance Reviews
Grading a student’s performance is probably one of the least favorite tasks of most journalism educators. One reason, apparently, is that grading in courses that involve so many writing assignments is tedious and time-consuming. Instructors also sometimes may harbor doubts as to how reliable grades are as a measure of journalistic potential and ability. Those feelings seem reflected in a review of the eleven articles on grading over the past two decades in Journalism Educator. The titles alone tell much about attitudes, including “Five proven ways to ease the chores of grading stories,”l‘‘Reflections on the difficult task of grading writing assignments,”z and “Grading system reduces anxieties, improves e f f~ r t . ”~ Several ideas have been advanced in the articles to make grades more closely reflect actual competence and ease student anxieties. Often the methods center on rewrites or on some type of ungraded approach. For example, Bowers (1973) described a method in which many individual stories were evaluated as acceptable or unacceptable for publication, rather than assessed letter grades. Stories could be resubmitted as many times as necessary until they were found acceptable. Some stories were graded and, of course, students still received grades at the end of the course.‘ Bowers and others have suggested that no grades be used in courses such as beginning news writing, perhaps substituting simply a pass-fail system. How well ungraded approaches would work or be accepted by students, however, can be questioned. During a panel discussion at a recent regional educators‘ colloquium, a participant asked, “What would you think of a system where we didn’t give students any grades until the end of the term, when one grade would be given?” “They’d riot! ” replied another educator, to general emphatic nods, laughs and “amens” from the rest of the audience. There was also discussion at the same meeting over the question of how fair it is to include at least some nonobjective components in journalism students’ grades. Some participants said they frowned on the idea, although Brigham Young University’s Ralph D. Barney found merit in the approach: “We have to prepare them when they get out for a world that is not necessarily easy or objective.” He said he often includes a “Barney Bias” factor of 10 percent in his course grades that covers what he acknowledges are subjective measures of such things as dedication and
Strong Internship Programs in the Newsroom: A Survey of Practices in the Field and Analysis of Tools for Improvement
Title of Document: STRONG INTERNSHIP PROGRAMS IN THE NEWSROOM: A SURVEY OF PRACTICES IN THE FIELD AND ANALYSIS OF TOOLS FOR IMPROVEMENT Karl B. Hille, Master of Arts, 2016 Directed By: Dr. Linda Steiner, Philip Merrill College of Journalism Accredited journalism schools acknowledge the need for strong internships, and provide basic guidance for newsrooms on administering internship programs. However, most newsroom intern supervisors begin with few other resources to build or improve a program. A survey of newsroom intern supervisors was undertaken to explore a range of internship environments, identify common practices and gauge interest in tools for improvement. In addition, a review of published literature pertinent to building, improving and running such a program was sought in order to provide a coaching framework to assist the newsroom supervisor. Most surveyed said they invented their program along the way and expressed an interest in other tools for improvement, but other production duties don’t leave much time for research. These modest survey results offer a peek through a doorway into a new field of internship research that offers much promise for future investigation. STRONG INTERNSHIP PROGRAMS IN THE NEWSROOM: A SURVEY OF PRACTICES IN THE FIELD AND ANALYSIS OF TOOLS FOR IMPROVEMENT
Educating the Educators: Rethinking Subject Matter and Methods
gate? In addition to general requirements in their professional education such as psychological and social foundations and student teaching, what specifically do social studies teachers need to know and be able to do? What, in particular, do they need to study in the subject matters of the social sciences (defined here, for purposes of brevity, to include history and geography), and what should they learn about its effective direction to desired results, that is, method? Usually answers to the first question require reference to the liberal arts component of teacher education and the second to methods in the professional education component. As we shall see, this separation of subject matter and method in the education of social studies teachers, although conventional, poses problems.