Abstract

While many researchers have advanced constructivism as the dominant learning theory and have presented compelling arguments for curriculum reform, which include such notions as cognitive apprenticeship models, and the need for agent-environment interaction, little has been said about the type or level of interaction needed to produce potent learning effects. Practical work in pre-tertiary, media education sets up an engaging model descriptive of the learner-media relationship and offers possibilities to measure such occurrences. This qualitative analysis is an attempt to describe and classify classroom exchanges and their residual effects. During a 15-week period, an independent observer followed the progress of 25 media education students from a local high school. The students were grouped to form five production teams and were assigned a variety of media production tasks. An equal number of students not attending a media studies course were assigned to a control group. Interactions in the treatment group were videotaped and transcribed. Unique behavior and verbal expression of any one student were interpreted as a possible instance of cognitive construction. Following this procedure, and open-ended interviews, students were classified in terms of their level of involvement with the media task, that is, 'mindfully engaged', 'mindlessly engaged' or 'non-engaged'. To determine the effects of this interaction, subjects were asked to submit journals responding to personal media consumption. Salient, residual, critical viewing skills were identified in these writings but were not evident in the control group or in the writings of subjects classified at lower levels of engagement. Moreover, posttest scores on media competencies showed significant differences between treatment and control groups.