Teachers’ designing and assessment of digital multimodal meaning making: Models for collaborative meta-thinking in action

Research has established the importance of teachers developing a meta-knowledge for talking about, teaching and assessing multimodal texts (Bearne, 2009; Cloonan, 2011; Kalantzis & Cope, 2023) enhancing students’ intermodal awareness and digital literacy to navigate and interpret digital multimodal text designs (Serafini, 2024). Existing models and frameworks recommend assessing meaning through modes beyond just language emphasizing the importance of explicit teaching of form, genre, and the use of a metalanguage (Anderson & Kachorsky, 2019). However, the assessment models that have informed teachers' practice over time often rely on detailed and comprehensive criteria, which poses challenges for teachers to interpret the qualitative aspects of students' multimodal meaning making (Cloonan, 2011). Our scoping review shows that these frameworks vary in assessment focus from formative (the composing process), summative (the completed composition) to the integration of both, that not only adds to the complexity but also highlights the challenges of adaptability to the local conditions (Åkerfeldt et al., under review). Also, the digital aspects are often implicit in the frameworks and thus remain peripheral to the subject content which in turn impacts students' ability to develop digital literacies and effectively navigate a digital multimodal landscape (Tan et al., 2020; Sofkova Hashemi, et al., accepted).
Based on the co-design work with teachers (McKenney & Reeves, 2019) in the
research project "Teachers' Meta-Knowledge and Assessment Practices in Digital,
Multimodal Learning Environments" (2022-2024), this presentation aims to
elaborate on tools for collaborative meta-thinking in teaching and assessing
students’ digital multimodal meaning making. The empirical evidence includes
lesson plans, workshop activities, classroom observations and focus group
interviews with teachers (N=60) from three compulsory schools in Sweden. Our
contribution will highlight the interconnected assessment process with teachers
examining alignment between task design, resources, teaching, and student
choices promoting teachers meta-thinking and identifying instructional areas for
further development.