Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Computers and Composition 31 (2014) 13–28 Notes Toward the Role of Materiality in Composing, Reviewing, and Assessing Multimodal Texts Matthew Davis a,∗ , Kathleen Blake Yancey b a University of Massachusetts Boston b Florida State University Received 17 November 2013; accepted 6 January 2014 Abstract In a discussion of validity in writing assessment, Pamela Moss and colleagues call for attention to ethical “IDAs” that constitute assessment: interpretations, decisions, and actions. Our purpose in this article is to engage such a hermeneutical conversation—that is, an exploration, analysis, and interpretation—focused not on how we assess material and multimodal texts, but instead on the preliminary question of how we encounter and interpret them. Here we focus on two genres—the scrapbook and the student ePortfolio—the first emphasizing materiality and the second multiple approaches to multimodality and multimedia. In this article, our goal is to understand more and better the practices teachers and scholars engage in as they encounter these two kinds of texts, believing that situating this inquiry through materiality and multimodality will help us understand each and assist us in moving toward an ethical and informed assessment practice of them. Ultimately, our argument is that such an approach may be very useful in helping teachers and scholars design both a language and an assessment process for multimodal texts. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: multimodality; materiality; writing assessment; validity; scrapbooks; portfolios Although multimodal texts are often associated with the late age of print, such texts have been composed for about as long as humans have roamed the earth. As Lester Faigley (1999) pointed out, Images and words have long coexisted on the printed page and in manuscripts, but relatively few people possessed the resources to exploit the rhetorical potential of images combined with words. My argument is that literacy has always been a material, multimedia construct but we only now are becoming aware of this multidimensionality and materiality because computer technologies have made it possible for many people to produce and publish multimedia presentations. (p. 175) With increased attention to and the attendant inclusion of such texts in our teaching (e.g., Atkins et al., 2006) has come an increased need for ways of assessing such texts. Simultaneously, so too has the assessment community been rethinking how to provide what Pamela Moss, Brian Girard, and Laura Haniford (2006) called ethical “IDAs”: interpretations, decisions, and actions. Toward that end, Moss et al. have identified three discourses that, concurrently, ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: matthew.davis@umb.edu (M. Davis). 8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2014.01.001