Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Miranda Lauber and I am from Sarasota, FL. I am a behavioral neuroscience student here at Florida State and I am on a pre-health track, planning to go to medical school after completing my undergraduate degree. The research project I am currently working on is a systematic literature review under the field of education and focuses on measuring and understanding the current state of teacher media literacies and competencies. This research has later implications in teacher training and professional development. Understanding of this topic is important for teacher and related student success.

Teacher Digital Media Literacy

Abstract

Our research concerns how teachers show and practice media literacy and competency. As a literature review, our purpose is to consolidate and understand a wide range of empirical research relating to this topic. This topic is important as insight into how in-service teachers practice media competency provides reason on how to better support training and practice for technology that is constantly changing. This research can also be applied to student outcomes and implicated for teacher training and professional development. Our research design is a systematic review of papers concerning teacher media competency and literacy. We defined criteria (e.g., empirical studies, research concerning in-service K12 teachers, not pertaining to student media literacy, etc.) for the articles we sent through the review. We have read abstracts of studies to assess if they were relevant or not and then will examine the narrowed pool of studies to see if they should be extracted for later stages of research. While we do not have concrete results yet, preliminary findings show that data reflects trends in how factors such as funding for schools, geographic location, and socioeconomic environments affect teacher digital media literacy. Additionally, we have found that the selected research articles are largely focused on digital media literacy with an emphasis on technological competency and ICT use. Trailing behind that is research concerning general media and visual arts literacy. Results and understanding from this research can be applied to policy changes that direct funding and awareness towards media
literacy and ICT training for teachers.

Keywords: teacher, digital, media, literacy, competency