Cultural Shifts, Multimodal Representations, and Assessment Practices: A Case Study

Abstract

Multimodal texts involve the presence, absence, and co-occurrence of alphabetic text with visual, audio, tactile, gestural, and spatial representations. This article explores how teachers' evaluation of students' multimodal work can be understood in terms of cognition and culture. When teachers apply a paradigm of assessment rooted in print-based culture to multimodal texts created with digital tools, they may fail to capture students' content learning and meaning-making processes that draw on diverse semiotic resources and involve multiple modes of representation.