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 culture to multimodal texts created with digital tools, they may fail to capture students' content learning and meaning-making processes that draw on diverse semiotic resources and involve multiple modes of representation.
Cultural Shifts, Multimodal Representations and Assessment Practices233 culture, include the ability to produce written symbols and engage in paradigmatic thought. Donald (1991) states that theoretic culture is marked by the external storage of memory that 'introduced new cognitive skill clusters that are generally referred to as "literacy" skills' (p. 746). Thus, in a theoretic culture, literacy skills consist of the ability to read and write alphabetic print texts. Within the realm of education, Shaffer and Clinton (2006) explain that, 'theoretic schooling emphasizes the production and consumption of symbolic text as a primary literacy activity' (p. 295). For hundreds of years, these skills were sufficient. However, Shaffer and Kaput (1999) argue that digital tools now allow for external processing to occur. Where pen and paper facilitate the external storage of memory, technology now enables us to readily compute algorithms, run statistical analyses, and create multimodal compositions. Consequently, Shaffer and Kaput (1999) posit that we are now in a fifth stage, that of virtual culture.Culture, in this sense, is defined by the ways in which individuals privilege specific modes and use diverse communication tools in order to construct meaning, share ideas, and create a dialogic space with their audience. Within a virtual culture, digital tools take information in one form and return it in another. 'Whether the [digital tool] "understands" the information in any sense is irrelevant here. The point is that a person can use .