Significance of Survey Results
Based upon our survey findings, we discovered that a significant number of composition instructors (16%), both inside and outside of Ball State's Writing Program, feel uncomfortable assigning multimodal projects in their classrooms due to concerns with assessment. Within Ball State's Writing Program, composition instructors are not using the required program rubric to assess their multimodal projects due to confusion about how a writing rubric used to grade traditional alphabetic essays could be applied to multimodal projects that incorporate both images and texts. What was most interesting is the number of instructors (16%) that simply give credit for a multimodal project if it is completed rather than actually evaluating the quality of it and 9% that simply grade a paper related to the project. If a student puts forth the effort of creating a project should they not be graded on the quality of it in the same way they would a traditional alphabetical text essay? Furthermore, we discovered that writing programs are not doing an adequate job training their composition instructors how to assess the multimodal projects that they assign. However, we argue that it would not be difficult to train their instructors if they demonstrated how they could continue to use their traditional writing rubrics, regardless of if their writing program requires it or not. In our next section, we will show how the elements of Ball State's Writing Program rubric, a traditional writing rubric, can be easily applied to multimodal compositions.