At the same time that creativity, play, and inquiry are receiving special focus in academic, professional, and educational settings, mandated assessments have never been more prominent, despite public debates that question the value of such testing. In the context of these apparently contradictory developments in literacy education, as a…

One of the purposes of the classroom-based research featured in this article was to explore how the ongoing development of young children's understanding of elements of visual art and design would affect their comprehension, interpretation and analysis of the artwork in a selection of picturebooks. Social semiotics, multimodality, sociocultural…

The authors examine how to assess multimodal reading practices with a group of middle school students attending an elementary school in Eastern Canada. They argue that to assess new reading practices, we need a fine-grained account of what students do, when they do it, with whom, why they do it, and finally, where they go in web space. The authors…