ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates ways of thinking about assessment for diversity across modes and media in a digital age. Designing assessments to accommodate and harness increasing diversity in terms of language, culture, and educational preparedness within the student population is becoming critical in contexts where diversity is a feature of higher education. Students bring with them experiential and semiotic resources from their home and educational environments. Some of these various resources are valued by the academy, whereas others are ignored. This has implications for pedagogy as well as assessment practices. This chapter draws on the notion of “recognition” in thinking about assessment. “Recognition” is about seeing the resources that students bring with them and valuing these resources by including them in the curriculum as well as in formal assessment practices. The chapter argues for the value of developing metalanguages in digital environments in order to surface resources by finding ways of talking about them, to include these resources in the curriculum, and to utilize these metalanguages of recognition in both formative and summative assessment practices. It ends by showcasing an example of a metalanguage of recognition which was developed in a second-year journalism course on data visualization.
