Assessment: Setting Parameters

Diane Penrod's book, Composition in Convergence: The Impact of New Media on Writing Assessment, is a good place to start when sorting through the issues of assessing student-produced proposal documentaries. Penrod acknowledges that "a text and what student writers do with the production of a text are always at the center of writing instruction and assessment, regardless of the medium used" (29). Not only must we make the objectives and expectations of the assignment clear, we must always be clear in our methods of assessment:

. . . compositionists not only will have to design curricula that account for teaching students how to become electronically and informationally literate but will also have to create assessment practices that explain how student writers develop and master the multimodal abilities needed to be considered literate. This suggests that writing specialists need to address the textual, design, and writing process variations between electronic texts and papertexts as well as the transformations that must take place in writing assessment to accommodate the shifts in texts, design needs, and composing process. (33)

Essentially, it is our duty to validate the merit of composing multimedia texts in our writing classrooms. If the functions of literacy are transforming as Kress and Bolter suggest, as compositionists we must prepare both our students and the academy for this acclimation into what I call the "new age in composition studies."

Carefully planning the components of the proposal documentary has been part of my learning process with this assignment. I agree with Penrod when she states that "greater efforts need to be made to demonstrate to the naysayers that course goals, standards, and outcomes can and do exist for these new textual forms" (33). I have found that clear strategies for implementing the documentary assignment and assessing the assignment are readily available.

Once again, let us turn to the Meek and Ilyasova's review where we find Alison Crockett's useful process for development of a digital video assignment, which are very similar to the traditional writing process. I had already begun to implement many of these steps in my proposal documentary assignment, but to find them so concisely listed provides a great resource worth replicating here:

Image by DavidDMuir

First, the concept or a thesis/main idea is created
Then a treatment or brainstorming occurs--a more developed and detailed idea coming out of the concept.
Next, an extended treatment or an outline might follow.
Research or getting your elements--which might include interviews, film and video footage, music stills, graphics, etc.--is next.
Then, depending on your elements, storyboarding or a more developed and complete outline follows.
The script or draft is developed around this time.
Finally, post-production or possibly a second/final draft occurs where you blend the elements together to tell your story. (8)

It is more than obvious that the components described by Alison Crockett validate digital video production as an exercise in the writing process, albeit through a different tool of expression. Writing is undoubtedly taking place in the production of new media texts.

This is the conclusion I wrote in 2008. >>