Designing Assessments: A Multiliteracies Approach

Assessment, as defined by policy mandates such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, is a well‒established concept within education. However, assessing multiliteracies presents new challenges because multiliteracies is about ways of knowing and being in the world rather than mastery of a particular set of cognitive skills. In this article, the author reviews three approaches to multimodal assessment. The author argues that although there are differences between the assessment approaches, the core of a multiliteracies assessment is teacher observation of student engagement, a practice in which good teachers already engage. The shift inherent in a multiliteracies assessment is that a pedagogy of multiliteracies raises a different set of questions about texts and text use, which lead to a new way of envisioning assessment.