How can teachers assess student work fairly when providing students multiple literacy modes to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding? How can a video be fairly assessed on the same criteria as a paper, or a painting? How does one standardize the evaluation between the different mediums.
I believe in giving students multiple options to demonstrate their learning to give them a fair opportunity to show their knowledge. This method of assessment allows students to follow their strengths. During my practicum I gave my Socials 8 class multiple options and had a detailed rubric that did its best to transcend across the different formats. However, when it still came to marking the assignments, I still struggled with this issue. Despite the struggle, I still believe in this these multi-modal formats are important for my students’ success. It is my goal to design assessments and rubrics that transcend across these modalities.
This is a dilemma I am still battling with and foresee myself perfecting it for a while. One source I have found is the website database http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/intro.html. Within this site there is an article by Mya Poe titled “Making Digital Writing Assessment Fair for Diverse Writers.” In this article Poe explains that if we are going to discuss fairness, we need to question how fair standardized testing is in the first place. She states, “no one test can be exactly the same thing for every test-taker.” However, this still does not help with my original question of how can teachers fairly assess multimodal works? From the courses I have taken thus far, I have learned that the best methods is to collaboratively design rubrics with students and allow them to choose from there. The assessment will be more fair than having a singular modality.
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