K-12 multimodal assessment and interactive audiences: An exploratory analysis of existing frameworks

Multimodal writing today often occurs through membership in an online, participatory culture; thus, based on affordances of online compositions, the audience for student writers has shifted from imagined readers to actual, accessible readers and responders. Additionally, recent content and technology standards for students in US schools emphasize the importance of distributing multimodal compositions to wider audiences. In this article, we closely examine attention to interactive audience and collaboration in a purposive sample of kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) assessment frameworks, as well as how these frameworks define multimodal composition. We found that multimodal composition is being defined consistently across all frameworks as composition that includes multiple ways of communicating. However, many multimodal composition examples were texts that were non-interactive composition types even though many authors acknowledged the emergence of interactive online composition types that afford the writer the ability to communicate and collaborate with an audience. In addition, the frameworks reviewed tended to focus on the final product and less often on the process or dynamic collaboration with the audience. In the discussion, implications for classroom teachers as well as considerations for researchers exploring the construct of online multimodal writing are offered.