Models for teaching and assessment of digital, multimodal texts

Assessment of multimodal digital texts has been discussed and problematised since 1996 when the New London Group (1996) published a paper that acknowledges and brings forward the importance of teaching about multimodal texts. Since then, a number of researchers have highlighted the importance of teachers developing a meta-knowledge for talking about, teaching and assessing multimodal texts (Unsworth, 2006; Bearne, 2009; Cloonan, 2011; Cope et al., 2011) that attends to various semiotic resources as meaning-making as well as the design of texts. However, models or frameworks developed and used as support for teachers' teaching and assessments are an unstructured domain, and little is known about what is the focus of the models. This paper presentation aims to address and unfold this unexplored and unstructured domain, focusing on what models in the research literature are presented and their main objectives. This work addresses what models have informed teachers' practice over time. Our proposal relates to the work on a systematic review of frameworks we are conducting in the research project Teachers' meta knowledge and assessment practices in digital, multimodal learning environments (2022-2024). Our goal is to shed light and map which models that have been developed and used in teaching and assessment of multimodal texts to support teachers' work in the classroom.

References

Bearne, Eve (2009). Multimodality, literacy and texts: Developing a discourse. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 9(2), 156-187.
Cope, B., M. Kalantzis, S. Mccarthey, C. Vojak, and S. Kline (2011). Technology-Mediated Writing Assessments: Principles and Processes. Computers and Composition 28: 79–96.
Cloonan, A. (2011). Creating Multimodal Metalanguage with Teachers. English Teaching 10(4): 23–40.
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u
Unsworth, L. (2006). Towards a Metalanguage for Multiliteracies Education: Describing the Meaning-Making Resources of Language-Image Interactions. English Teaching 5(1), 55–76.