The Promise Of Multimodal Composing: Article Analysis

Summary: “Changing the Game of Literature with Authentic Assessment: The Promise of Multimodal Composing” was written by Suzanne M. Miller, Merridy A. Knips, and Stephen Goss who discussed the importance of student engagement in the classroom to improve test scoring and overall performance. Miller et.al. discussed how multimodal composing gave a new avenue of student motivation when it came to learning literature or writing essays about literature. They supported their claim by providing case studies of teachers who used a form of multimodal composing in their classroom to improve their students’ focus and performance. The form of multimodal composing they used was called digital video composing (DV) which is a video that is made to teach …show more content…
explain the importance of student motivation in the classroom. They pointed out that some of the students who came from poverty stricken families or communities found it harder to focus on the lesson while the teacher taught them how to write essays. One student expressed how unmotivated he was in his class when he said, “Before, all I got was words on how to write words” (Miller et.al., 2013, p. 88). He stated this after his teacher started using DV composing. He also stated that it was easier for him to write essays after creating a video where he acted out the meaning of a piece of literature (Miller et.al., 013, p. 92). This is just one of the case studies that were used in this article to support the claim that multimodal composing should be used in the classroom to improve student performance. The other cases that support this claim are very good examples of how DV composing has improved student performance in the classroom. I think that DV composing should be implemented in the classroom as another mode of teaching. Teachers should not limit themselves to just using PowerPoints and lectures to teach their students, they should use multimodal teaching methods to keep the interest of their students while still focusing on the important information the students need to know. There are many classrooms that would benefit from this form of teaching, but there are also some teachers and classrooms that could not use this form of teaching because of higher testing standards. The case studies provided in this article were very helpful in understanding the importance of multimodal composing and DV composing and how it affects student performance. The lack of opposing evidence, however, did not show the negative affects of using DV composing in the classroom. Miller et.al (2013) stated that this kind of teaching provided “an authentic assessment of learning beyond monomodal linguistic assessment, toward performance of