As digital technology is becoming increasingly more common in the classrooms, students are creating screen-based texts that incorporate various modalities. Previous studies show that even if students’ texts are multimodal, the complexity in multimodal text composition are not the subject to established assessment practices privileging verbal and written language. Assessment practices signal which knowledge is legitimate and influence how teaching is organized. How teachers acknowledge and assess multimodal aspects and how practice development in this matter can be supported thereby becomes important issues to address.

This study was conducted within the project Digital Arenas in Literacy Practices in Early Primary School (DILS) where teachers from three classes in different schools worked together in workshops to develop literacy teaching. The empirical material consists primarily of the participating teachers written assessments of student texts, before and after an intervention where the teachers were introduced to multimodal perspectives and concepts for analyzing and assessing multimodal texts. The text material was further complemented by video-recordings of this workshop and the teachers’ discussions. Exploring how the teachers understanding of students’ multimodal texts is manifested in their assessments, the study highlights the challenges education and teachers face. The results shows how a lack of a meta-language to describe quality and development in multimodal text-composing results in assessments influenced by established assement practices focusing formal language aspects. Access to such meta-language provided more focus on the use, balance and interrelations of modalities for communicative effect. The implications of what knowledge and practices that are made available to teachers are discussed, and further research on how to implement multimodal assessment practices in the pedagogical practice is suggested.