Knowledge representation and subject matter in digital multimodal student products

In recent years, the focus of the educational debate on digital literacy has shifted from a broad interest in digital communicative and meaning making practices (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Kress, 2010; Bezemer, 2016) to a more specific focus on computational thinking (Denning & Tedre, 2019; Wing, 2006) and digital fabrication (Marshall & Harron, 2018; Resnick, 2017; Smith, 2018). This movement brings changes to the classroom, both in the form of new technologies (e.g. robots and Micro:bits), but also in the form of new practices (e.g. programming) and new forms of knowledge representations and student products (e.g. scripts and complex multimodal digital products). Consequently, existing views of assessment of students’ performance and quality in students’ products are challenged (Cope & Kalantzis, 2017; Fraillon, 2019). In this paper, we focus on the assessment of digital multimodal student products. Following Selander (2008), we see learning as a transformation process. The digital multimodal student products are the resulting output of a primary transformation unit and, thus, represent the process of transforming subject matter content into knowledge and competences through the design of multimodal digital products. We present findings from a design based research project (Barab & Squire, 2004) focusing on coding across subjects in a Danish lower secondary school context. The purpose of the project is to support teachers in developing learning designs that integrate coding across the subjects Danish, Science and Technology, and Crafts and Design. As part of the project, we aim to understand how subject matter knowledge is represented in digital multimodal student products and how these new types of student products can be assessed. In this paper, we address the following research question: How is subject matter content represented in complex digital multimodal student products? How can complex digital multimodal student products be assessed with respect to student progression? We collected student products in the form of digital stories and models created using the block-based visual programming language Scratch (www.scratch.mit.edu). In addition, we performed interviews with students while they were walking us through their digital projects. The student products were analyzed in terms of subject matter content, multimodal complexity and code complexity (Jewitt, 2014; Shah, 2017) while the interviews provided insight into the digital design process. Our main findings suggest that designing digital multimodal products provides students with rich opportunities of actively transforming subject matter content into knowledge representations. However, our analysis also suggests that these new forms of knowledge representation present the teacher with several challenges: Is the learning outcome of these processes better than the outcome of teaching sequences based on traditional literacy teaching such as written essays? How can students’ stereotypical use of signs when choosing pictures and sounds be qualified through learning designs? References Barab, S., & Squire, K. (2004). Design-Based Research: Putting a Stake in the Ground. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls1301_1 Bezemer, J. J. (2016). Multimodality, learning and communication: A social semiotic frame. London, [England]; Routledge. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New Literacies, New Learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/15544800903076044 Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2017). e-learning ecologies: Principles for new learning and assessment. 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