To provide insight into the issue of multimodal literacy instruction, the authors explore presentation techniques and instructional activities employed in their secondary language arts classes. They collaborate on assignments that focus students on "anchored media instruction" and engage them in producing multimodal, technology-infused projects,…

This article recounts what happened when one of the authors, a pre-service teacher, introduced a digital multimodal composition project in her 9th-grade inclusion English classes to support junior high students as they read the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird". Rather than regard new literacies as competing with print literacy for attention, the…

Multimodal texts involve the presence, absence, and co-occurrence of alphabetic text with visual, audio, tactile, gestural, and spatial representations. This article explores how teachers' evaluation of students' multimodal work can be understood in terms of cognition and culture. When teachers apply a paradigm of assessment rooted in print-based…

This article argues that theoretical understandings of multimodality have enormous potential for assessment purposes in secondary school contexts. Informed by the work of three researchers in three North American high schools, the article offers vignettes of the effective assessment of communicative competence in English classrooms that draws on…

Technological developments are impacting upon UK assessment practices in many ways. For qualification awarding bodies, a key example of such impact is the ongoing shift towards examiners marking digitally scanned copies of examination scripts on screen rather than the original paper documents. This digitisation process has obvious benefits,…

Conceptions of literacy in the secondary English language arts classroom today have expanded in multiple directions, moving far beyond former emphases on reading comprehension and writing ability. This article presents the efforts of two secondary English language arts teachers in the Midwestern United States to expand the meaning of literacy in…

Within large scale educational assessment agencies in the UK, there has been a shift towards assessors marking digitally scanned copies rather than the original paper scripts that were traditionally used. This project uses extended essay examination scripts to consider whether the mode in which an essay is read potentially influences the…

Vowels were presented through auditory, visual, and auditory-visual modalities to 18 hearing impaired children (12 to 15 years old) having good, intermediate, and poor auditory word recognition skills. All the groups had difficulty with acoustic information and visual information alone. The first two groups had only moderate difficulty identifying…

Examined whether determining a delinquent's preferred cognitive mode and instructing to it would facilitate academic achievement, in a study of 36 incarcerated adolescents. Results showed delinquents with relative strength in visual/spatial learning, which included the vast majority of delinquents, scored significantly higher under…

The purpose of this research was to design, create a prototype, and evaluate an Educational Data Acquisition System (EDAS) for use in secondary school science laboratories. The prototype of EDAS consisted of a microcomputer, data acquisition interface, sensors, software, and documentation. It provided the teacher and students with a…

A study to assess techniques for presenting information in tape-slide format compared the effectiveness of a projected viewing guide with that of a printed viewing guide or tape-slide only, using pretest and posttest to assess retention. The projected guide resulted in improved retention of information. Fifteen references are listed. (EAO)

The feasibility of guiding students of moderate aptitude to select appropriate learning strategies while they are learning an imaginary classification system was investigated in a study that contrasted the effect of system-assigned strategies for learning concepts with strategies selected by students. Subject-matter content was based on a set of…

The instructional effectiveness of integrating abstract and realistic visualization was studied using five types of visualization, three levels of general ability and two modes of instruction. The dependent variable was performance on a four-part criterion test representing five different types of instructional objectives, which was administered…

Briefly describes a study of five New York City high schools conducted to determine the impact of microcomputers in schools. Interviews and surveys were used to address issues including student and teacher attitudes toward computers, teaching methods, teacher-student interactions, and differences between computer instruction and regular classes.…

This document reports on the first year of the STACI (Systems Thinking and Curriculum Innovation) project, a two-year project which is examining the cognitive demands and consequences of using the STELLA (Structural Thinking Experimental Learning Laboratory with Animation) software to teach systems thinking, content knowledge, and problem solving.…