Personal Blogs

Dear colleagues

I am hoping to enrol to study on a Ed.D this year and my current passion, largely arising from personal teaching and learning experience,  is the role multimodality and genre awareness in assessment. Although the physical sciences have long embraced an approach to assessment that necessitates developing literacies in different communicative modes, the process of adoption has been slower in Psychology – although of course many Psychology courses that are hybrid with the physical sciences (such as the bio-psychological ones) are already a long-term exception.

Nevertheless, Psychology has a clear link to application in different work settings and academic disciplines, in which genre and multimodal awareness is crucial in understanding its subject-matter and critiquing its tools (IQ scales for instance). This is sometimes disguised by terminology used in pedagogies – for instance, a report might cover very different genres – and even shape knowledge differently – when its function is varied between ‘pure academic’ (if such can be said to exist now) and workplace and other contexts. The role of the internet in necessitating literacy across different modes, contexts and audiences likewise emerges as a factor here.

Psychology IS now asking students to respond to assessment tasks in ways that necessitate at least a lay awareness of genre and multimodality’, requiring perhaps:

• 1.       context-specific or ‘situated’ knowledge of reporting skills, or;
• 2.       ability to read and / or compose products of an ensemble of modes that demand awareness of how different modes of making-meaning shape that meaning.

 It is probable that my approach will be entirely based on documentation (subject to permissions) in the 3 different Psychology courses I teach but I may (again subject to permission being given by appropriate sources and ethical considerations being covered) extend to recruiting (a) focus group(s). The theoretical background will use social semiotic and multi-literacy theories, as well as querying assessment from an assessment-for-learning perspective.

My rough title at the moment is to be:

“What do concepts of multimodality and genre offer to the re-formulation of Assessment-For-Learning in Applied Psychology?”

I am not yet near completing a Proposal and am not here asking for participants – but rather ‘crowd-sourcing’ ideas and thoughts. If stimulus is required, compare the quotations below:

1.       “Assessment needs to be seen and rethought in the context of multimodality.” (Kress et. al. 2014:3341)

2.       “Without adequately addressing (other educational) issues, hasty implementation of MEA (Multimodal Educational Assessment) is akin to a blind man riding on a blind horse[1].” (Liu 2014:3)

References

Kress, G., Jewitt, C., Ogborn, J. & Tsatarelis, C. (2014) Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom (first published 2001) Bloomsbury Classics in Linguistics Ed. London, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Kindle Ed.

Liu, J. (2014) ‘Multimodal Educational Assessment: From Transmissive Learning to Creative Production’ in Journal of Educational Policies and Current Practices 1 (1): 1 – 11.