Assessing Multimedia Compositions: Additional Resources
A set of teacher resources for the assessment of multimedia compositions and projects. Three of these resources address K–12 student populations and two address college-age populations. This resource can stand alone, and it also appears as a part of the curated collection on this site, “Assessing Multimedia Compositions.”
Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom
Herrington, Anne, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran, eds. 2009. Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
In this collection, teachers K–13 present specific multimodal composing projects, considering them in light of goals for student learning and challenges of assessment. In addition to illustrations of students’ compositions, the chapters include samples of specific evaluation rubrics. Reviewed here
Enabling Assessment Ove Time with Digital Writing Tools
Hicks, Troy. The Digital Writing Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2009. Chapter 6: “Enabling Assessment over Time with Digital Writing Tools.”
As the title suggests, in this book Hicks shows readers how to adapt principles of the writing workshop approach to digital writing. His chapter 6, on assessment, includes formative and summative assessment; teacher, peer, and self-assessment; and assessment rubrics that are tailored to specific digital genres. See also the review by Ken Martin and Digital Writing Workshop wiki.
“Children Writing: Multimodality and Assessment in the Writing Classroom
Vincent, John. 2006. “Children Writing: Multimodality and Assessment in the Writing Classroom.” Literacy 40(1): 51-57.
In this journal article, John Vincent describes his work with multimodal composing in his class of third grade students in Victoria, Australia. As he notes, assessment was the difficult piece: there are rubrics for assessing computer skills, but “very few schemes to assess quality or content.” He therefore “relied principally on qualitative assessments based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) grammars of semiotic modes, and observations of the degree to which students integrated modes to present the messages.”
Vincent includes actual student multimodal projects in his article and, through his responses to these projects, makes visible the criteria that he is bringing to bear on them—an approach, as he notes, derived from his readings in Kress and van Leeuwen.
Looking for Sources of Coherence in a Fragmented World: Notes Toward a New Assessment Design
In this article posted with permission from the journal Computers and Composition, Kathleen Blake Yancey takes on the question of the assessment of new media compositions.
Beginning with the assumption that “coherence” is a central feature of both print and digital texts, Yancey explores what that means for digital texts, focusing on the kind of relationships that are created among various features of a text. As a foundation for assessment, she presents a heuristic to encourage an inquiry-based stance toward digital compositions that focuses on types of arrangements created, their intention, and their effects.
Looking for Sources by Kathleen Yancey.pdf Copyright © 2003 by Elsevier Inc. Posted with permission. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. 2004, March. “Looking for sources of coherence in a fragmented world: Notes toward a new assessment design.” Computers and Composition 21 (1): 89-102.
Open looking for sources_kathleen_yancey.pdf
