Media Literacy Education Program Evaluators: What’s the Job Description, Again?

Abstract

School program evaluation researchers face a set of overlapping questions concerning our roles in the field: For the sake of "the data" and in quest of "the truth," am I a shrewd researcher before all else? For the sake of community-building and establishing respectful, reciprocal relationships with my school partners, am I first a gracious school guest, prepared to sacrifice research integrity for the sake of goodwill? Or, for the sake of students, am I foremost an advocate for the intervention, pressing an agenda I firmly believe in? Could I be fully all three? As an ingenue, who recently turned toward a field (media literacy education, MLE) that had long held much appeal but that did not square with my "Associate Professor of Psychology" title or graduate training, I grapple with these questions.