Virginia SOL 12.C.4.D
The Standard
Explain and analyze how values and viewpoints are included or excluded and how media influences beliefs, interpretations, and behaviors.
Virginia Standards of Learning for English · Examining Media Messages
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students identify whose values and perspectives a media message presents, minimizes, or leaves out. They analyze how wording, images, sources, framing, and omissions can shape beliefs, interpretations, and actions.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Students can compare two reports about the same event and identify differences in sources, wording, images, and missing perspectives. They explain how those choices may shape audience judgment or action, using specific evidence.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may treat bias as simply false information or assume every omission is intentional. They may name a viewpoint without citing details, or claim audience influence without explaining how the message creates that effect.
How to Assess It
- Show one advertisement or news post. Ask students to name one included value, one excluded viewpoint, and one likely audience response, citing a specific detail for each.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give groups two printed reports on one event. Students highlight sources, images, loaded words, and missing voices in four different colors.
Ask students to write: Whose values shape this message, whose viewpoint is absent, and how might that absence change an audience's judgment?
Play Media Detective with short posts. Teams earn points for naming framing choices and supporting each claim with a specific detail.
Compare a local issue's newspaper headline, television clip, and social post, then predict which format might prompt sharing, concern, or action.
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Printable 12.C.4.D Worksheet
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Related Standards
- 12.C.4.C
Analyze and evaluate how the media's use of symbolism, imagery, metaphor, and bias impacts the message.
- 9.C.4.D
Examine how values and viewpoints are included or excluded and how the media can influence beliefs, behaviors, and interpretations.
- 10.C.4.C
Examine and analyze how media messages are constructed based on varying opinions, values, and viewpoints.
- 8.C.4.A
Examine how the media can influence beliefs, behaviors, and interpretations by using persuasive techniques (e.g., name calling, innuendo, glittering generalitie...
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