This advice is based on my experience as a teacher and moderator, and is intended to help colleagues when supporting their students for MEST2.
Of course, the AQA specification has details which you and your students will need to be familiar with; the briefs themselves are fairly detailed and there is additional information in the Teachers’ Resource Banks for this unit. Each centre also has its own coursework advisor, (details available from the Media dept at AQA).
Moderators are always reminded that their job is to support a centre’s marks wherever possible, so it’s a good idea to include plenty of annotation on work so that your moderator can see where marks were awarded. Also, if students have collaborated on part of the production, it helps the moderator to know whether they’ve all been rewarded equally for this element, or whether some put in more to the success of the production than others and have therefore been given more marks for it.
Pre-production research: Magazines
Encourage students to research institutions and audiences in detail, quoting their sources. For example, rather than making sweeping, uniformed statements about the audience of a particular magazine, some research on the magazine’s own website and/or in their media pack will give their audience profiles.
Also, www.nrs.co.uk has some free content,...
