Assessments of Digital Writing: How Do We Identify and Value Competencies?

In pre-digital writing classrooms, instructors sought student outcomes that focused on developing language arts literacy.  But in digital writing classrooms, those outcomes have been expanded to developing literacies--textual, visual, aural, participatory (social networking), software and hardware, and on. So, as we develop assessment tools for multimodal composition classrooms, where should instructors place their focus if they don’t want to abandon their emphasis on traditional core writing instruction?

As one example, The National Writing Project’s Because Digital Writing Matters describes the Michigan Department of Education’s “Content Expectations” (2006) that focuses on the tools and techniques of digital writing in their high schools, which can be transferred to the college student as well (pp. 102-103). These standards of assessment layer digital writing onto other valued competencies in literacy:

1. Blogs, web pages - the student must write, speak, and create artistic representations to express personal experience and perspective;
   
2. Multimedia presentations - use the formal, stylistic, content, and mechanical conventions of a variety of genres in speaking, writing, and multimodal presentations;
   
3. Management of print and electronic resources - develop a system for gathering, organizing, paraphrasing, and summarizing information; select, evaluate, synthesize, and use multiple primary and secondary resources;
   
4. Use of technological tools - Use word processing, presentation, and multimedia software to provide polished written and multimedia work; 
5. Make supported inferences and draw conclusions based on informational print and multimedia features; use various visual and special effects to explain how authors and speakers use them to infer the organization of text and enhance understanding, convey meaning, and inspire or mislead audiences;
6. Examine the ways in which prior knowledge and personal experience affect the understanding of written, spoke, or multimedia text; 
7. Understand the commercial and political purposes of producers and publishers - learn how they influence not only the nature of advertisements and the selection of media content, but the slant of news articles in newspapers, magazines, and the visual media.
   (Note: All bold text was the emphasis of the original author, not mine).

I wish that my writing throughout my high school and early college years would have been subject to the above standards of assessment.  I would have become a more critical analyzer of information rather than a student who wrote what I thought my professors wanted to hear in the format they wanted to see (a traditional academic essay).

Not that that format lacked value; I needed to learn it as a foundation of writing. But it wasn’t the end-all, be-all as it was treated. I needed to acquire more and other literacies, as evidenced by the fact that as a graduate of the MAPW program, I discover myself lacking in personal digital literacies that I was not even aware of until taking the Digital Technology in the Writing Classroom course. Thus, I support assessment methods and standards that push students into the unfamiliar and that cause measurable development in a variety of digital literacies.

Eve Bearne wrote of standards of assessment applied to the development of student writers as "multimodal textmakers." I’d like to know more about how to describe the development of students from: "a multimodal text maker in the early stages, to becoming an increasingly assured multimodal text maker, then becoming a more experienced and often independent multimodal text maker”  (Eve Bearne, 2009, p. 105). 

I’m interested in how instructors have implemented these or other similar standards in assessing students’ writing, and any rubrics used that cover these dimensions. I find it somewhat daunting to create such a rubric, so I’d love to see more examples of workable assessment tools.