Group Documentary

Grade 12 English Performance-Based Assessment 2

Task

Students in groups of 3, 4, 5, or 6 students will produce a documentary about an issue/problem in the local, regional, or international environment (not political). 

Each group of students must inform the teacher about the students in the group and their choice of topic and take the teacher’s approval before they start working on their documentary. 

In the documentary, they have to present the issue, its reasons, nature, effects, etc. and suggest their own innovative, doable, and logical solutions. 

Sources of information

Students in each group have to interview people working in the related sector to add validity to their findings (at least one interview).  They also have to bring evidence from authentic academic or government sources about the issue/problem.  Their discussion must be supported with pictures from the environment of the issue/problem, which can be taken directly from the field or from online sources. 

The documentary must show data from all those sources in a way that gives the audience a clear and comprehensive background about the issue/problem and leads smoothly to the solution.  The solution is a suggestion by those students themselves.  They have to create innovative, logical, practical, and doable solutions. 

Criteria

The final production must consider the following criteria:

1.      Human interest appeal: is the topic of interest to the audience, and does it arouse their curiosity to know more about it?

2.      Visual appeal: is there adequate visual simulation (action, movement, color, display, number of scenes) to support the topic?

3.      Picture quality: do lighting, exposure, color balance and camera angles look like real TV?

4.      Pace: are the different scenes of reasonable length (not too long or too short)?  

5.      Audio quality: does the documentary have clear audio (no hiss or hum)?

6.      Narrative quality: does the narrative/dialogue have professional voice and tone, and does it relate to the scenes it appears with? 

7.      Specific focus: does the documentary have a specific theme that the audience can identify while viewing?

8.      Specific points: does the documentary make specific points about the topic that the audience can identify?

9.      Extent of research: does the documentary reflect assiduous, or detailed and hardworking, research of the topic?

10.  Credible/Appropriate interviews: does the documentary interview the right people? Does each interview present relevant, authentic data?

Language

This documentary comes with narrative, so the narrating students must use correct, professional, and original English.  This means varied sentence structure, concise style, objective tone, and academic vocabulary from the lists taken in high school.  Plagiarism is certainly unacceptable and leads to rejection of work. 

Rationale

This project aims to train students to innovate ideas, make choices, plan action, devise methods of action, identify priorities, coordinate efforts, cooperate among each other, solve problems, observe deadlines, and make critical decisions.  At the same time, students will enhance their awareness of one or more fields of practical knowledge and integrate their school learning with real life situations.  These are higher order thinking skills that will prepare students for higher education and life.  

Important: while producing this documentary, students may not act illegally, like driving a car without a driving license, or like entering private or any other protected property without explicit and written permission from the owners.  Any infringement on the law will result with the rejection of the documentary and the consequent loss of marks.  Students must observe the rules and laws all the time.

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