A Review of Media Argumentation: Roles of Background Knowledge in Critical Reading

This paper offers a critical review of a newspaper argument regarding the problems of high school education assessment for university entrance examination system in the United Kingdom. The media account raises three sets of questioning to hold that the nation's long-standing A-levels have failed and is no longer viable as a high-stakes test. However, it is found that the writer's argumentations involving misleading conceptions can be deconstructed because of invalid reasoning and unreliable evidence. So, it is proposed that a reasonable solution to replace the discredited A-level exams should be to adopt an eclectic approach for assessing candidates' multiple capabilities; performance, potentiality and critical thinking skills. These criteria for component-oriented assessments are designed to measure their high school academic achievements and intellectual capacity for tertiary education; in the process of such measurement, critical-logical reasoning abilities for sound judgment and problem-solving tasks should be incorporated with the basic precondition that each university possesses its own discretion for the determination of adequate proportions to reflect each of the assessment outcomes. It is, therefore, expected that this critical review will inspire the readers to understand aspects of assessment as an educational field and to confirm how seriously they may be misguided by a distorted media argumentation without substantive background knowledge.