Evaluation - Scottish Screen

One teacher summed up the spirit of positive embracement of MIE and the affordances it
offers:
I keep saying that over the last few years we seem to have become
more constrained but MIE has reminded me of things I used to do –
allowing children to be more independent, not expecting written work
at the end of everything we do. I don’t have to control everything
they are doing. They are all there – different types learning where you
don’t have a product at the end of it. I think this is good with
A Curriculum for Excellence.
Impact of the programme on learning
Teachers reported that pupils had been keen to engage in MIE and all spoke about the pupils’
growth in confidence and self-esteem during the project; several teachers made reference to
the film festival event which they believed had given the pupils a tremendous sense of
achievement and pride. The pupils’ expectations of what they were able to achieve appeared
to be surpassed, ‘…they were absolutely amazed at how it turned out.’ Overall, the teachers
stressed that MIE had been fun for pupils and teachers alike.
Many teachers commented on the pupils’ attraction to active learning and the apparent deeper
engagement brought about by such hands-on learning experiences:
…they were desperate to use the cameras and get involved…
…they liked doing the doing things.
However, not all aspects of MIE were as enthusiastically embraced by the pupils. Teachers
said that, while pupils relished using the cameras and taking part in the group activities, they
were less keen to engage in storyboarding tasks and could become ‘quite bored’.
The evidence from a few teachers suggests that MIE may have a positive impact on
motivating boys who are less drawn to, and who have less success in ‘traditional’ literacy
learning using books. Teachers reported that these boys were more focused during MIE and
that the tasks ‘grabbed their attention’. Similarly, several teachers spoke about pupils who,
ordinarily, struggled in their learning; there had been several incidences where these pupils
had made significant and leading contributions to the group during MIE. This had changed
peer and, sometimes, teacher perceptions of the pupils involved and previous ideas about
their abilities had had to be reconstituted.
Many teachers felt that MIE had started a process of greater critical awareness of how and
why multimodal texts are constructed in particular ways and this helped pupils to look at the
authors’ purposes in more depth. Some teachers believed that they had begun to see an
increase in pupils’ critical awareness of societal and global issues but direct evidence on this
was somewhat thin.
Among the specific factors on impact on learning teachers referred to:
• pupils learning to express their ideas in the form of a text which
they’d previously had no experience in constructing
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