Harnessing scoring rubrics and fieldwork in the teaching of Media Law to non-Law students

Joseph Fernandez
Curtin University of Technology

Keywords: scoring rubrics; fieldwork; assessment

This paper discusses two initiatives introduced in the teaching of Media Law - a core unit in Curtin University 's Journalism and Mass Communication programs. The first involved the use of scoring rubrics in the assessment process. The second involved the introduction of a fieldwork component to the Unit's teaching and learning arrangements. Many students in these programs aspire to employment in media industries in which they must produce material for publication. Consequently, they must be conversant with publication law so as to avert legal liability and to exploit the limits of free speech. The Curtin experience shows that scoring rubrics are an effective assessment tool and that fieldwork is an effective assessment activity in the teaching of Media Law to students in a non-Law School curriculum. Scoring rubrics enable students to submit better quality work by making the grading criteria visible in advance to them. Rubrics aid in providing timely and detailed feedback, encourage critical thinking, facilitate communication with other tutors, help refine teaching skills, and level the playing field. The Unit's fieldwork, on the other hand, provides a foundation for the absorption of syllabus material. Such activity provides students with a useful context for Media Law studies. It also provides a welcome break from in-class activity, and introduces students to operational aspects of law-making institutions while training them to harness that experience for practical output, that is, by requiring them to produce news stories of publishable quality. This paper discusses how scoring rubrics and fieldwork produce positive teaching and learning outcomes in Curtin's Media Law unit. This examination covers a six-year period during which more than one thousand students undertook Media Law units. These approaches have led to the enthusiastic reception of the Unit, as the institutional teaching quality feedback consistently reveals.