ABSTRACT

As the nature of learning has changed, so too has our notion of literacy. While educators recognize the transformative nature of education in the 21st century, the how and why of assessment still eludes curriculum developers, educational policy-makers and classroom practitioners. Many of the current assessment practices are too narrow, too limited to cater for the oral, critical, linguistic, visual and technological understandings required by today’s learners. While teachers are adjusting their pedagogies to match the real-world practice, they are struggling to respond with appropriate assessment techniques. To fully grasp the complexities associated with assessment of these new ways of learning, one must examine the origins, practices and shift to multimodal learning and the impact of this on assessment practices. The nature of teaching and learning is becoming increasingly complex and learners can no longer rely on a single learning design. Today, most effective learning designs include a variety of media, combinations of modalities, levels of interactivity, learner characteristics and pedagogy based on a complex set of circumstances (Metiri Group, 2008). As with the nature of learning, the nature of literacy has also evolved. On review of current literature, no single or worldwide definition of literacy can be found. Traditionally, literacy was simply defined as the ability to decode written information. In the 1950s UNESCO believed a person to be functionally literate when he/she acquired the basic knowledge and skills in reading and writing (Baker & Street, 1994). By 2003 the United Nations (UN) had broadened the definition by recognizing and coining the term “multiple literacies.” Sheldon Schaeffer described the term during the official launch of literacy in Thailand, as diverse, with many dimensions and learnt in many different ways (Lonsdale & McCurry, 2004, p. 5). The UN acknowledged at this time that the uses of literacy were changing rapidly in contemporary societies in response to broad social, economic and technological changes, recognizing that there were many practices of literacy embedded in different cultural processes, personal circumstances and collective structures (Lonsdale & McCurry, 2004).