Evaluation of students’ digital animated multimodal narratives and the identification of high-performing classrooms

Abstract

Contemporary approaches to literacy embrace digital and multimodal communication, and this is increasingly recognised in the syllabi prescribed by various education authorities across the world. Insufficient attention has been given to the evaluation of multimodal texts in ways which are semiotically grounded, accessible to the teacher and scalable to larger research studies. We present an evaluation instrument that addresses these requirements. The application of this instrument to 81 texts drawn from 17 classes has established the viability of the approach and allowed a subset of 'high achieving' classes to be identified. The derivation of the instrument is described in detail, the final form presented, evaluator guidelines elaborated, and the rating scales developed in full. Limitations are discussed along with recommendations for further work and development, but as an evaluation initiative the current work is presented as an important contribution to the continued development of multimodal pedagogy.