Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation
by Heidi McKee and Dànielle DeVoss:
A Review

 

Part 3 consists of Chapters 7-10 and moves smoothly from classroom assessment in Part 2 to more specified multimodal assessment.  It begins with The National Writing Project Map group which reflected on multimodal assessment and shared experiences and assignments. This chapter is richly multimodal and shows the many options available to our teachers and students. This chapter is more learner focused than the previous parts of the text and helps shape the pedagogy and benefits of multimodal assignments in student growth. It flows well into the next chapter by Kathleen Yancey, Stephen McElroy and Elizabeth Powers which shows how portfolios and portfolio assessment can be multimodal. It reemphasizes how multimodality can benefit student growth. It shows teachers ways of reading and using e-portfolios in their classrooms. It discusses how using e-portfolios can open up more experiences for our students and expand their audience base. 


Portfolios—especially electronic portfolios—provide a vehicle for the kinds of assessment we will need in order to design curricula for a student body that not only includes individuals from a wider and wider range of cultures, but also from a wider and wider range of ages and experience.”
~Bill Condon


This chapter is important and strengthens the entire text, mainly because Yancey is so richly cited in the other chapters that it would be remiss to not include her discussion of the subject. In Chapter 9 Crystal VanKooten adds a rhetorical focus to creating an assessment model for multimodal assignments. Within this chapter is a valuable look at student perspectives on using this model to assess digital work. The videos of the students gives more insight than quotes alone would. Nicely concluding Part 3 is “Assessing Civic Engagement: Responding to Online Spaces for Public Deliberation” by Meredith W. Zoetewey, W. Michele Simmons, and Jeffrey T. Grabill.  Which gives even more options for using multimodality and how to assess it in the classroom.  When discussing Part 3 in her foreward Lunsford says that “By the time I finished reading this section alone, I had amassed a pile of notes I plan to bring to my own teaching and assessment in the future. I felt fired up and ready to go!” This section is by far gives the most information that is applicable in the classroom.