Formative Self Assesment

The difference of assessment between traditional texts and multimodal texts is no more than a matter of training, and very little at that. Assessing websites and digital compositions is no different than navigating the beaten path of rhetorical features. However, the difference of assessment begins to take shape in the move from a final evaluative assessment, where students get a letter grade and gold star from the instructor, to students who become aware of their own rhetorical choices and who are able to assess the reception of these choices on their own.

Borton and Hout note, "[when] we helps students learn to assess their own compositions...." (99).

Sorry to interrupt this quote, but students come to composition courses able to do assess their own texts, just not the standard FYC essay. The genre of the academic essay is alien to them. The instructor is the central authority, who has gained authority from consumption, not production of the academic essay.

If authority can be gained from consumption of a form, then mutlimodal and new media texts exist in the domain that students have authority over--even before setting foot into a classroom. The student can discern how these texts produce the effect that they do and how these texts move towards their ultimate goal. The exposure students gain from everyday interaction with these texts give them the ability to form their own assessment on multimodal texts, while also allowing the student to train that lens on their own work producing digital texts.

Although, as Borton and Hout argue, "it is entirely possible that the processes of creating texts that [goes] beyond the alphabetic will be less familiar to many students" (99); however, the creation of these texts--the material production of multimodal texts--using software and other digital media as creation maybe foreign to students, the rhetorical moves made in digital texts are more familiar to students, than the traditional academic essay.