ThomasThesisFinal

Re-engaging Adolescent Readers Through Multimodal Literacies
A Thesis
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree of
Masters of Arts in Teaching
Jacob A. Thomas
Division of English
College of Arts and Sciences
Graduate School
Minot State University
Minot, ND
Spring 2015

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Abstract
Many educators and school district curriculums are struggling to find a balance between old texts
and new technologies. Much research has been done on how students read multimodal texts, or
texts that incorporate images, videos, and other interactive elements with words. Qualitative
research methods were used to study how student engagement, level of effort, and reading
comprehension were impacted through the use of multimodal texts in tandem with a district-
mandated text. In a Midwest school district, six male students and and seven female students
were asked to read through a required text and perform a comprehension check and summative
blog post summarizing major themes. Then, students were asked to read a longer required text
with similar themes while utilizing multimodal literacies in an online environment. A similar
comprehension check and blog post were given after utilizing these multimodal literacies to see
if they had any impact on engagement, level of effort, and reading comprehension. While
initially the multimodal literacy tasks caused student engagement and level of effort to increase,
that initial spike fell as students continued working with the texts, indicating that student choice
of texts in conjunction with utilization of multimodal literacies could have significant positive
implications for students.

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Acknowledgments
This thesis would not have been possible without the gracious assistance of Dr. Ronald
Fischer, Dr. Lisa Borden-King, and Marjory Bubach. Their advice and support throughout the
research process is immeasurable, so let me attempt to repay it with a paltry “thanks.” The same
goes for the students who allowed me to have this conversation with them.
Finally, my wife and daughter have also supported me with patience and kindness beyond
what most normal people would consider reasonable. I’m very glad to be back.

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Table of Contents
Page
Abstract.......................................................................................................................................... iii
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv
List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. vi
List of Figures............................................................................................................................... vii
Chapter 1: Introduction....................................................................................................................1
Chapter 2: Review of Literature ......................................................................................................4
Males & Literacy .................................................................................................................4
The Content of Male-Centered Texts ..................................................................................6
Changing Definitions of Learning & Literacy.....................................................................8
Males & Digital Literacies...................................................................................................9
Recommendations..............................................................................................................11
Chapter 3: Methodology ................................................................................................................12
Settings and Participants....................................................................................................12
Research Activities ............................................................................................................13
Informed Consent & Confidentiality .................................................................................16
Data Collection ..................................................................................................................16
Risk Factors .......................................................................................................................17
Data Analysis.....................................................................................................................17
Chapter 4: Results..........................................................................................................................18
Demographics & Study Breakdown ..................................................................................18
Student Engagement ..........................................................................................................19

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Digging through textbooks ....................................................................................19
Inclusion of multimodal literacies .........................................................................20
Digital tools as a hook............................................................................................22
Notifications and gamification...............................................................................23
Tracking and movement ........................................................................................23
Collaboration..........................................................................................................24
Novelty wears off...................................................................................................26
Level of Effort....................................................................................................................27
Time spent working ...............................................................................................27
Revision & hunting for images..............................................................................27
Personalization.......................................................................................................27
Reviewing for comprehension check.....................................................................28
Completing required texts......................................................................................28
Student Comprehension.....................................................................................................29
Comprehension checks ..........................................................................................29
Student blogs..........................................................................................................30
Genius annotations.................................................................................................30
Transcendentalism final projects ...........................................................................34
Troubleshooting.................................................................................................................36
Conclusion .........................................................................................................................37
Chapter 5: Discussion ....................................................................................................................38
Student Engagement ..........................................................................................................38
Level of Effort....................................................................................................................40

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Student Comprehension.....................................................................................................42
Limitations.........................................................................................................................44
Implications........................................................................................................................45
Recommendations for Further Research............................................................................45
Conclusions........................................................................................................................45
References......................................................................................................................................48
Appendix A: Preliminary Student Survey .....................................................................................52
Appendix B: Blogging Rubric .......................................................................................................55
Appendix C: Pre-multimodal Literacy Task Comprehension Questions ......................................56
Appendix D: Post-multimodal Literacy Task Comprehension Questions.....................................57
Appendix E: Follow-Up Survey ....................................................................................................58
Appendix F: Summative Assessment ............................................................................................60
Appendix G: Interview Questions .................................................................................................61
Appendix H: Participant Consent Letter........................................................................................62
Appendix I: Parental Letter of Assent ...........................................................................................63

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List of Tables
Table Page
1. Mean Comprehension Check Scores .....................................................................................29
2. Mean Blog Post Scores..........................................................................................................30
3. Students Final Project Rubric Scores & Types ......................................................................36

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List of Figures
Figure Page
1. Pre-project reading enjoyment and ability .............................................................................18
2. Pre-project preference for assignment format........................................................................20
3. Students making use of the suggestion feature on Genius (2015) .........................................26
4. Author created example of an acceptable Genius (2015) annotation .....................................31
5. Student annotation that meets some of the requirements, but fails to expand upon them.......32
6. Student annotation that meets the suggestions for a good annotation ....................................33
7. One student did more than the required amount of annotations by offering suggestions to
others.....................................................................................................................................34
8. Average Transcendentalist final project rubric scores by gender...........................................35

Chapter 1
Introduction
I am the only male currently teaching in my Language Arts department. As I look around
the gymnasium where our school hosts parent-teacher conferences, I see male-dominated
departments clustered together laughing and making small talk while waiting for parents to
shamble up confusedly, clutching a paper copy of their child’s grades. I never really thought
anything of it until I listened to the way my students spoke about various assignments in my
classroom: some don’t like to read because they perceive it solely as an activity for girls; others
detest reading because well-meaning teachers have used the F-bomb (“feelings”) to coerce
students into making connections with the literature, an immediate turn-off for many. The female
students I work with, even if they may not dig into the reading with enthusiasm, don’t have the
same adverse reaction as some of my male students. What is regarded as an inconvenience for
my female students is an affront to basic human rights in my male students. Is it possible that the
way teachers discuss reading in their classrooms might actually be driving males away?
One day, while a student was explaining why he didn’t complete the reading homework
from the night before, he claimed that he had just been up too late playing video games the night
before. Because I, too, enjoy playing digital games now and again, I asked him what he had been
playing that had been so enthralling. His response was Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011), a
fantasy game notorious for its epic storyline, lengthy readings of documents containing
background information about the game’s world, and hours upon hours of dialogue eliciting
character development — the very things we were attempting to study with that night’s reading!
In the world of a game, reading is viewed as the beginning steps of a great adventure; in the
world of my classroom it is merely a nuisance.

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While I had grown up reading novels and fell in love with the written word, I also grew
more and more accustomed to living in a digital world. My cousin and I would toil away on yard
work for hours on end if it meant that we could get a night’s worth of uninterrupted time in front
of the television to find out what happens to Cloud and his companions in Final Fantasy VII
(Square Enix, 1997), a sprawling epic tracking the adventures of ten characters spanning
continents and containing mounds of side-missions that help to define the world of Gaia. Later,
as a student in high school, I recognized the struggles of Beowulf in Cloud’s “Hero’s Journey”
from eco-terrorist to planetary savior, which served to heighten my enjoyment of both works.
Many of my students, male and female, cannot be bothered to have these same experiences. I
began to wonder if there would be some way to bring these two diverse worlds together: would it
be possible to bring together the district-mandated texts I fell in love with in high school and
other literacies, such as video games, social networks, and blogs, that students are beginning to
use with greater frequency?
The purpose of this research study is to see what happens to the engagement level of
students who are reading district-mandated texts when allowed to use “multimodal” literacies
(including social networking and blogging) as a way to enter said texts. I will discuss the trends
of males turning away from literacy activities like reading, the rise of alternative literacies that
are being ignored in the classroom, and how making relevant connections to the student’s life is
an essential step toward building literacy habits in adolescents. Throughout this study, I will
focus on the following questions:
● What happens to engagement with reading when students use multimodal literacies
promoted by tools like Genius and blogging platforms in correlation with district-
mandated texts?

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● What happens to a student’s level of effort when reading district-mandated texts when
allowed access to digital devices in a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) environment?
● What effect might incorporating a variety of multimodal literacies into instruction of
district-mandated texts have on student reading comprehension?
My hope is that I can track how student reading comprehension, engagement, and effort
change when utilizing these alternative literacies with which many students are already
proficient.

Chapter 2
Review of Literature
Will incorporating multimodal literacy activities improve student reading comprehension
engagement with reading, and student level of effort? As the Common Core standards (National
Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA Center] & Council of Chief State School
Officers [CCSSO], 2010) are putting more emphasis on rigor and relevance, as well as ramping
up the literacy (reading and writing) requirements necessary for students to be career and college
ready, adolescent males, who already have a fraught relationship with literacy, are struggling to
keep up. The results of the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Grade 12
Reading Assessments show that the percentage of 12th grade males at or above proficient on the
reading assessment have remained fairly consistent since 1992, hovering around an average
score of 284 compared to the average female score of 293 (U.S. Department of Education, 2013).
What’s interesting, though, is that males have consistently scored around 10 percentage points
less than females in this same time period. This disparity may stem in part from male students’
negative attitudes toward reading.
Males and Literacy
Senn (2012) examines the many ways in which teachers can work with male students in
order to get them more interested in reading and writing. Her interest in the influence of male
literacy grew out of informal observations she noticed in her classroom, and though her research
is primarily in the elementary school grades, it highlights a disturbing beginning to the
relationship between males and literacy. Even at an early age, her male students tended to view
literacy activities as torturous. Senn (2012) brought up a wide variety of reasons behind this view
of reading and writing, but one of the most significant reasons behind the trends she noticed in

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her classroom was attitude toward reading. Senn (2012) cited a longitudinal study of first-
graders by Kush and Watkins (1996) that found girls held a more positive attitude toward
reading and writing than their male counterparts, a trend that held for three consecutive years (as
cited in Senn, 2012, p. 213). Unfortunately, it didn’t stop in the fourth grade.
Citing their work in “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys”: Literacy in the Lives of Young
Men, Senn (2012) quotes Smith and Wilhelm’s (2002) observation that, by high school, nearly
50% of male readers classify themselves as “nonreaders” (p. 212). Senn (2012) attributed the
growth of nonreaders to differences in brain development, a lack of motivation and confidence,
and predetermined gender roles that can show up as early as preschool; what it all boils down to,
though is that males tend to be disinterested as they move through school, either through
preconceived notions about which gender literacy is “for” or the lack of male-oriented texts
being taught in the classroom (p. 216). Senn goes on to recommend several strategies for
building male literacy examples in her classroom, involving everything from bringing in notable
male readers from the community to increasing movement for the boys in class so they are able
to concentrate for longer periods of time. Regardless of how a teacher accomplishes it, though,
literacy needs to be practiced with approachable, relevant, and interesting texts.
Noted adult-education theorist Freire (1983) saw this as well. In a speech to the Brazilian
Congress of Reading, he retraced the role reading played in his life as a young man growing up
in Recife, Brazil, and the ways that the world around him played into the development of his
reading skills. Reading, he posits, begins not with the words printed on the page but with
learning how to read the world. As illustration he offered several examples from his childhood,
stating that the sound of birds singing and rainwater flowing through the dirt allowed him to fully
understand the purpose of language by connecting what he saw in his world and hearing his

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parents and siblings speak and interact with the animals and objects and food around them.
Through these observations, Freire was able to fully grasp language’s purpose of reflecting his
world and experiences, adding, “by doing it myself and seeing others do it […] I learned the
meaning of the word squashing” (Freire, 1983, p. 6). Through the act of “reading the world,”
students are exposed to real life events and a concrete purpose for reading the word that allows
them to fully engage with a text (p. 6). He theorizes that divorcing texts from the world around
them leads to complete disengagement on the part of the students, adding, “I would find it
impossible to be engaged in a work of mechanically memorizing vowel sounds” (p. 10). The
purpose of reading, then, is to connect our ideas with the ideas of others in the hope that we can
arm ourselves with new knowledge to confront unfamiliar experiences in the world at large.
Adding to this idea is Gee (2003), who argues that texts can be approached in a number
of ways depending on the student’s group identifications like race, gender, and socioeconomic
status, as well as the background knowledge and purpose for reading at that particular moment.
He uses the Bible as an example: at different stages in a student’s life the Bible may be
approached with the mindset of a theologian, a literary critic, religious skeptic, African-
American, male, priest, or historian depending on the reader’s purpose for that particular reading
experience. We are always, he argues, approaching a text with at least one of the social or
cultural groups to which we belong. Though readers may change the people and groups they
identify with, it is impossible for a reader to engage in the act of reading entirely without a group
affiliation.
The Content of Male-Centered Texts
For male readers, though, finding a text that speaks to their group affiliations is not easy
as it might seem. Parkhurst (2012) studied the genderlect, or style of speech used by a particular

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gender, of nearly 200 works of fiction written explicitly for young adult males. Of the texts
studied, he found that only 11 were written in a predominantly male genderlect, even though all
200 were marketed toward adolescent male readers. To make matters worse, though, the kinds of
texts that students are required to read in school are often left out of the classroom. Williams
(2004) discussed the relationship that gender and literacy have as students grow into adolescents.
Classrooms, she argued, have a tendency to focus on texts that are “not only intellectually
superior [. . .] but also morally superior” than texts males are drawn toward which often have
violence, action, and “low-culture” elements prohibited in classroom settings (p. 512). Again
citing Smith and Wilhelm’s (2002) study, Parkhurst (2012) described a study of 49 young men
who were devoted readers of science fiction and/or fantasy novels, genres that typically have
higher amounts of male-centered interests, because the subject matter “helped them with
situations in real life” (p. 512). Even though these situations were fantastical, the characters
reflected thoughts and feelings these boys had experienced in their own lives, a phenomenon the
researchers termed “the reality principle.” “Where the boys did not find this air of reality,”
Parkhurst (2012) added, “was in school-assigned reading. They saw no purpose to their reading
assignments and no connection to their lives” (p. 17). To complicate things even further, even
when books seem to fit this reality principle, there is no guarantee that male readers will buy into
the texts. It all boils down to the subject matter and genderlect found in the text.
The problem with the male genderlect is that it relies heavily on the types of words and
subject matter that many teachers are uncomfortable with broaching in class. Williams (2004)
recalled the moment when her son stood in front of a crowd of peers and parents at a summer
writing camp and proceeded to read a selection from his novel, Mutant World, filled with
“swooping starships, slimy aliens, and vast laser-induced explosions” (p. 510). Because boys

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aren’t finding their world to be one of action, violence, suspense, and colorful nicknames for
peers in the classroom, they are instead gravitating to other types of “texts” such as peer groups,
films, and video games, choices which often aren’t reflected in the current curriculum (Williams,
2004, p. 512). Males are choosing to spend more time with these alternative “texts,” many of
which require work similar to “traditional” literacy tasks; therefore, it may be time to re-think the
common definition of “literacy” to include these alternatives.
Changing Definitions of Learning & Literacy
Gee (2003) has devoted some time examining how video games can help us pin down
this changing definition of what it means to be literate. Gee mentions that educational theories
developed and practiced by “baby boomers” of his generation are no longer relevant to the fast-
paced, high-tech world that today’s teenagers are expected to enter upon high school graduation.
Gee (2003) argued that video games are but one way to access “social cognition,” which states
that “learning is not just a matter of what goes on inside people’s heads but is fully embedded in
(situated within) a material, social, and cultural world,” and New Literacy Studies, which is
based on the assumption that reading and writing do not just occur inside the mind, but also as
“social and cultural practices with economic, historical, and political implications” (p. 8). Video
games, he argued, allow us to tap into these two realms of cognitive sciences and engage with a
variety of different literacies. Gee mentioned that reading “multimodal texts,” or texts that have a
mixture of words and images, requires the reader to have a basic understanding of the principles
of visual literacy, or reading images and advertisements, a literacy task that strays from the
common definition for literacy: reading and writing text. Gee also contends that, with the
massive influx of digital media in our culture, multimodality must now also include “sounds,
music, movement, bodily sensations, and smells” (Gee, 2003, p. 14). Gee (2003) wrote:

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Print literacy is not enough [. . .] People need to be literate in a great variety of different
semiotic domains [a type of communication involving one or more modality . . .] If our
modern, global, high-tech, and science-driven world does anything, it certainly gives rise
to new semiotic domains and transforms old ones at an ever faster rate. (Gee, 2003, p. 19)
Because the Common Core standards are pushing students to become “career and college ready,”
and because new state assessments tied to the Common Core standards are becoming largely
computer based, it is important for educators to make room for these semiotic domains in their
classrooms, especially when we consider that all students, not just males, are flocking toward
them.
Males & Digital Literacies
Both boys and girls are immersing themselves in different multiple semiotic domains
through the rise of media, such as TV, film, blogs, e-mails, and video games. A recent Pew
Research Center survey found that nearly 92% of teens surveyed are online daily, and that 24%
of those surveyed are online "constantly" (Lenhart, 2015, p. 2). Lenhart (2015) also found that
males in particular spend most of their time playing video games, while females prefer to use
visually oriented social networks like Instagram and Tumblr. Prominent video game researcher
McGonigal (2010) estimated that the average young person in a country like the United States
will spend nearly 10,000 hours playing online games by the time they reach 21 years of age —
nearly the exact amount of time it takes to attend school from fifth grade to high school
graduation with perfect attendance. She argued that debates over whether or not playing games is
a “waste of time” are irrelevant; what is most important is that there is currently a “mass exodus
[. . .] in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing
games” (McGonigal, 2011, p. 4).

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Sanford and Madill (2007) argued that, even though boys tend to move away from
reading and writing in the classroom and appear to be abandoning literacy altogether, they are
actually gravitating more toward these multimodal literacies. Over the course of a nine week-
long video game making summer camp, the authors collected data on the boys enrolled in the
course through observations, interviews, and recorded field notes. The data gathered from this
predominantly adolescent male sample was coded according to Green’s (1997) three-
dimensional model of literacy: operational dimensions, which involves a basic understanding of
reading and writing; cultural dimensions, which examines the social side of literacy; and the
critical dimensions of literacy, which claims that all literacies are socially constructed (qtd. in
Sanford and Madill, 2007, p. 437). This echoes Gee (2003) and Freire’s (1983) argument that all
literacy tasks cannot be divorced from the reader’s world and upbringing.
What Sanford and Madill (2007) noticed in their observations was that students enrolled
in this summer camp were able to practice and succeed in various forms of literacy that aren’t
always taken into consideration in our classrooms. For example, while the literacy involved in
creating a video game is not the same literacy found in a close reading of Romeo and Juliet, the
students were expected to read and write menus and textual instructions, and manipulate symbols
to communicate with future players (Sanford and Madill, 2007, p. 441). From a traditional
classroom viewpoint, it may appear as though these students are doing little more than playing
games; what actually occurred, though, was students communicating with others in the room and
those worlds away through a different semiotic domain. What’s more, these students were able to
start building a community with the instructors and their fellow students since the material being
covered fit in with the sociocultural world these students inhabited (Sanford and Madill, 2007).
Integrating literacy techniques that are often dismissed in the classroom, while not a foolproof

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plan to capture the attention of male students, can go a long way toward closing the achievement
gap between male and female readers in our classrooms.
Recommendations
While it is interesting to examine the avenues students are moving toward, it doesn’t
change the fact that there are mandated curriculums at work in our classrooms that could take
years, or even decades, to change. Also, while none of the studies mentioned advocates
abandoning our current curriculums, approaching new literacies in the classroom is still looked
down on by some teachers. Freire (1983) noted that even though we should incorporate the many
new ways to engage in the literacy process, it does not excuse teachers and students from reading
“the classic literature in a field of knowledge seriously and continually” (p. 9). For all of the
discussion of embracing new literacies, we as educators are still at a loss sometimes for how to
make these mandated texts relevant in a world where changing literacies are evolving rapidly. Is
it possible, then, to merge these differing worlds? It is no secret that our world will continue to
change drastically due to advances in technology. At the same time, many of the mandatory texts
required by some school districts serve an important function as foundational works of American
literature and timeless works of art. The job of educators, then, is to explore ways of bringing
new and old together in educational experiences that are relevant not only for what students are
studying and learning, as we often try to do, but also to connect this material to our modern
world in terms of how such experiences are done.

Chapter 3
Methodology
mandated texts?
For this study I will use the phenomenological approach. While it is useful for outsiders
to predict what adolescents may enjoy, even those with the best of intentions can miss the mark
as Parkhurst (2012) observed while looking at novels written for adolescent males. The
phenomenological approach will allow students to lend their own voices and work to this project,
giving the researcher and the subjects under study equal importance, a necessity when
considering the prevalence of multimodal literacies currently being integrated into curricula
worldwide.
Settings and Participants
This study collected data from a group of twenty eleventh grade students, ten male and
ten female, at a large senior high school serving grades 11 and 12. This school, located in an
urban district, has approximately 900 students and 153 teachers, staff, and administrators. Grade
11 Language Arts, a required course for graduation within this district, is designed around
multiple works of American literature, many of which are recommended or required by the
district. Two of the texts mandated by the district, the works of Transcendentalist authors R. W.

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Emerson (2008) and H. D. Thoreau (2000), are challenging reads that many students have a hard
time relating to and an even harder time understanding, making them perfect for use in this
study. These twenty students were selected based on the results of the second reading
comprehension test. I chose the top five scoring boys and top five scoring girls, as well as the
five lowest scoring boys and five lowest scoring girls in order to gauge whether or not the
multimodal literacy activities were useful to students or not.
Research Activities
In order to get a baseline for which devices and multimodal literacies my students are
already using, I administered a “getting to know you” survey before the study (See Appendix A).
This survey asked students to identify the types of devices they own, the multimodal literacies
they use most frequently, and devices to which they have regular access (questions 9-11). In
addition, it included questions from a similar survey given by Scholastic (2015) which asks
questions about enjoyment of reading (questions 5 and 6), the types of texts students enjoy
reading (question 8), student frequency of reading (question 4), and self-perception of reading
ability (question 7).
I assigned the two readings by R.W. Emerson (2008) to my students and asked them to
write a blog post about the main themes and ideas expressed in the texts. These were graded with
the blogging rubric, which allowed me to see how well they understood the material without the
use of multimodal literacies (See Appendix B). After this initial reading of the selections,
students were given five comprehension questions that related to the text. In addition, I included
a question that asked students to rank their difficulty reading the text on a scale from one to five
(See Appendix C). The Emerson (2008) pieces are quite short, though still challenging, and

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served as good scaffolding as we moved into the H.D. Thoreau (2000) piece which is longer but
contains many of the same challenges and themes.
I used Genius (2015) in order to tap into the multimodal literacies already used by many
students. Genius (2015) is an online website that allows for anyone with an account to annotate
any text that they come across with their own thoughts, as well as making it easy to integrate
images, videos, and sound recordings from other websites. I was interested in learning if, by
using these multimodal literacies and asking students to incorporate their own thoughts and
reactions to the text, perceptions toward reading district mandated texts might be changed. I was
also interested to see if student reading frequency and perceptions toward reading in general
might increase. The Genius (2015) website also functions as a community, allowing other
individuals to comment on and add their own thoughts to the text, further enforcing the Genius
founders’ (2014) goal of “annotating the world.”
The actual work on the Genius platform took place over three weeks in class, starting
with an overview done together in order to get students comfortable with the platform, and
culminating with a larger class project, some of which was completed outside of class, in which
multiple sections of Grade 11 Language Arts annotated one copy of selections from Thoreau’s
(2000) Walden, further reinforcing the communal aspect of the platform and allowing multiple
literacies to be engaged. During this Genius assignment students were assigned roles at random,
with a few prompts for each role in order for students to have some direction as to what to do
once using the platform. Each role involved incorporating some type of outside media to get
students using their multimodal literacy skills.
While students worked on the project, I used five similar comprehension questions as a
formative assessment to determine whether or not the use of multimodal literacies increased their

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comprehension. I again asked students to rank their difficulty reading the text on a scale from
one to five (See Appendix D). I will use the scores from this second set of comprehension
questions to choose my participants. The ten highest scoring students, five male and five female,
and the ten lowest scoring students, again five male and five female, were chosen for further
analysis in this study. These twenty students were assigned codes and filled out a follow up
survey where they gauged their enjoyment of these texts throughout the multimodal literacy
project (See Appendix E).
Once all students had an opportunity to review everyone’s Genius submissions and we
completed some more in-class discussions about the pieces, I administered a summative
assessment gauging the students’ reading comprehension of the assigned texts (See Appendix F).
All students were also asked to write another original blog post about some of the major themes
brought up in these required texts, which allowed me to compare the study participants’
understanding of the material after utilizing these multimodal literacies. This was assessed using
the same rubric as before (See Appendix B).
Because students had class time to work on these Genius projects, I was able to conduct
sectional observations while they worked. I divided the class into four quadrants. For 10 minutes
I observed one quadrant and took notes. Then, I moved on to the next quadrant and observed for
10 more minutes to take notes, and so on until all four quadrants had equal observation time.
This project took a little bit of time as students got acquainted with the Genius platform, so I
allowed for two and a half days of in-class work and observation time.
Finally, I conducted follow-up interviews with two students from the participant group
who improved the most and two students who stayed the same or regressed the most between
pre- and post-multimodal literacy comprehension questions (See Appendix H). Interviews were

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conducted on school grounds at the student’s convenience and were digitally tape recorded to
ensure accuracy. All digital recordings were transcribed and coded so that no names were
attached. Recordings and transcriptions were stored on a password protected computer and
deleted at the completion of the study. All observations, student survey results, follow-up
interviews, and examples of student work were analyzed and coded to determine whether or not
incorporating multimodal literacies made a difference toward student level of effort to reading
and overall reading comprehension.
Informed Consent and Confidentiality
All students involved in the study were required to submit letters of consent and, because
they were under eighteen years of age at the time of the study, their parents also signed letters of
assent (see Appendices H and I). Student Genius annotations, because of the nature of the Genius
tool, are accessible for the public to read through the Genius website. Even though anyone has
access to read student contributions on the Genius website, all contributions to the course
document must be “Accepted” by the teacher before appearing readable by the public. Student
blog posts are also public, but my ratings were not seen by anyone besides the student. The
rubric for blog posts was used only for purposes of this study and did not affect the student’s
grade. Survey results and follow-up interviews were stored and backed up onto two different
password protected computers and were deleted after the completion of the study. Student names
were withheld and replaced with a code for the purposes of data analysis, and all interviews were
coded as well. All other documents were destroyed at the completion of the study.
Data Collection
The introductory survey focused on questions about the student’s attitude toward reading
in the classroom, the frequency with which students read outside of the classroom, the use of

17
multimodal literacy tools, and their own perceptions of their reading ability. The follow-up
survey and interviews asked students to detail their feelings toward the actual work required of
them for the Genius class assignment and blog posts. The students were asked to include their
study code and gender on these surveys simply for the purpose of differentiating between male
and female students, and so their comments can be paired with the actual work submitted
through Genius, blogs, formative assessments, and the summative assessment.
Risk Factors
The only risk factor involved in this study was toward the student’s grade based on
performance on any of the aforementioned classroom activities and assignments. This risk was
not anything outside of what would be normally expected from these students as all of the
assignments listed are mandatory for all students enrolled in Grade 11 Language Arts, not just
the students selected for this study. To minimize this risk, students taking part in the study were
allowed access to the same intervention and academic supports they normally had access to in a
Language Arts class (i.e. additional help, IEP accommodations, etc.)
Data Analysis
The results from the intro and exit surveys, both comprehension tests, relevant examples of
student work, and follow-up interviews were coded to examine if the use of multimodal literacies
had any effect on student perception of required texts, reading comprehension, and reading
engagement.

Chapter 4
Results
mandated texts?
Demographics & Study Breakdown
Of the twenty students chosen for inclusion in the study, only thirteen returned the letters
of consent and assent necessary. Six of these students were male, and seven were female.
Relevant samples of student survey responses and work were collected and coded. Figure 1
shows a breakdown of how students perceived their own reading enjoyment and reading abilities
on the introductory survey, where females self-assessed as enjoying reading less than their male
counterparts, but appeared more confident in their overall reading ability (See Appendix A). One
student did not respond to this survey.
Figure 1. Pre-project reading enjoyment and ability (n=12).
6.1
8
7 7
0
2
4
6
8
10
Reading Enjoyment Reading Ability
Females Males

19
Interviews were conducted with two male participants and two female participants, with
one student who improved with the use of multimodal literacies and one student who stayed the
same or regressed with the use of multimodal literacies represented with each gender. These
interviews were recorded and transcribed. All of the above data, as well as observation logs,
reflections, and memos were coded for discussion and organization.
Student Engagement
Digging through textbooks. When students were working through the two short
readings from R. W. Emerson (2008), we went through one together as a class and talked about
relevant themes and elements that we would continue to examine throughout the
Transcendentalists unit. I projected “Self-Reliance” on the front board, and we read through it
together, stopping periodically to clarify what the author was discussing. After we finished
reading I gave students a long list of questions to answer and discuss as partners before bringing
everyone back together to discuss our findings as a large group. Then students were instructed to
begin reading “Nature”. I instructed them to work together and again search for answers, but I
would mostly be there as a last resort circling about the room. I did not project this selection on
the front board and instructed students to use their own textbooks, a suggestion that was met with
audible groans and a number of avoidance behaviors — sharpening pencils, going to lockers to
grab textbooks, etc. One group of students later in the day even pushed off walking across the
room to grab a spare textbook until they had nearly exhausted the time remaining in the class
period! Later, when one student, “Brent,” was asked what strategies he used to get into a text
assigned in the textbook, he replied, “You suck it up and you buckle down and you read it.
[Laughter.] You just, you just do it cause then it’s like, oh, well... I can either take a bad grade or
I can just actually read it. And then after two hours of fighting it and procrastinating you just

20
eventually read it and just do it.” Similar methods of avoidance were present throughout all class
periods.
After discussing the “Nature” section, I handed out comprehension check one (See
Appendix C) and informed students that this should be completed on their own, but that it wasn’t
a quiz and was only a snapshot of where they were at with the Transcendentalists. Immediately
the questions started flying — “What if we don’t finish?”, “Is this graded?”, and “Can I just say I
don’t know?” I again stressed that I simply wanted to see where students were at this point in our
Transcendentalism unit and that they should do their best and work alone. Those who did not
finish with the amount of time left in class were instructed to bring the assignment back to me
before the end of the day. Of the students chosen for this study, nine indicated that they preferred
to read class assignments in some sort of interactive format, with three indicating that they prefer
to read on paper. One student did not respond to this survey.
Figure 2. Pre-project preference for assignment format (n=12).
Inclusion of multimodal literacies. After students had completed this initial
comprehension check, I assigned them to write a two to three paragraph blog post discussing
some of the major themes brought up in R.W. Emerson’s (2008) texts. Students had a few days
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
Interactive Paper
Females Males

21
to complete the blog assignment with a little time in class devoted to reviewing and working on
their blog posts. Once the review had finished students got straight to work on the blog post. As
they were working, many students used their headphones to listen to music on their phones or the
laptops, and most were working quietly. Many finished with extra time left in the hour.
A few days later I introduced Thoreau (2000) and we discussed his relationship with
R.W. Emerson (2008). As we were gearing up to start working with the Genius (2015) platform,
though, I had fallen ill and was unable to be in class with my students. Instead, I recorded a video
tutorial of how to use Genius and posted it to our class learning-management system (LMS),
instructing the substitute teacher to point students to this video so that they may sign up for
Genius and begin playing with the website. By the end of that day, nearly all of my students had
signed up for the website and begun figuring out how to work with Genius.
Once I returned to the school, students began using the Genius platform and working
multimodal literacies in to H.D. Thoreau’s (2000) text. Students were assigned roles with certain
guiding questions to help them with their annotations, though they were free to work in other
sources and images as they saw fit. As we were discussing the layout of a longer text like this,
there were excited exclamations when I mentioned that the audio version of this text was
automatically embedded in to the page we were annotating. Buy-in across all hours was nearly
instantaneous. Students were actively skimming the text and bouncing to other sources, as well
as reading annotations by their classmates as they began to show up. I provided the laptops and a
bucket of headphones for those who wanted to make use of the audio version or listen to music
as they read and worked. Many students seemed enthusiastic about the inclusion of images and
seemed to enjoy looking at the images their classmates had chosen to include with a specific
section of the text.

22
As the day wore on, though, students began packing up early and were more easily
distracted by classmates, cell phones, and the end of the school day creeping ever closer. Two
boys near the end of the day packed up their things ten minutes early in order to sit and talk with
one another, while another girl played on her cell phone for most of the hour and did not
accomplish any work for the project.
After students were given a couple of days to work on the project, they were given
another comprehension check dealing with Thoreau’s (2008) text (See Appendix D). Students
were allowed to use either the textbook, which contained an identical version of the Thoreau text
we were looking at, or the Genius page that they had worked on annotating over the past few
days. Nobody chose to use the textbook.
Digital tools as a hook. As students began to get settled into working on Genius, the
room was mostly silent and the majority of students were on task. During my quadrant
observations, I would find that students were, more often than not, on task and working at their
own speed. A large majority of students also chose to use headphones during their work time to
either listen to the text being read to them or listen to music to help them focus. One student,
“Erika,” who indicated that she prefers interactive formats over traditional paper based ones,
said, “I understand things better when I read out loud or when I hear someone else reading out
loud.” Brent echoed this, stating that the use of audio on his phone helped him work his way into
a text that, on first glance, seemed intimidating due to its length. “If I’m not really into [a text]
immediately, then I like to have something speak to me so that I can hear it and not have any
other distractions,” he stated. Many other students also expressed interest in the audio version
throughout the project.

23
Notifications and gamification. One aspect of the project that I had not considered was
the use of notifications and game-like elements to keep students engaged with the material. One
student noted that notifications from our LMS “reminds me to make sure I get [the assignment]
done.” From an instructor’s perspective, these notifications worked to my benefit as well, telling
me when students had added an annotation to the text almost instantaneously. A few students, in
particular, decided to complete their annotations so late at night that I had to silence my
smartphone so I could get some sleep!
Genius also revolves around a gamified social network that sends users a notification
when others have given their annotation a thumbs up, thumbs down, added a suggestion, or
“pyong-ed” an annotation and shared it with their followers. All of these elements feed into a
user’s “IQ,” which is a numerical score based on the feedback a user submits to other
annotations, how many annotations that user has added to a variety of texts on the site, and how
many people have given feedback to that user’s annotations. During work time, as students
began to poke around the site, I noticed that quite a few students were examining their “IQ”
scores and were looking at the feedback others were leaving for them on Genius.
Tracking and movement. Another thing I noticed during classroom observations was
that it became much easier to see students engaging with the material than it had been when they
were looking at the textbook. In the majority of my observations students were actively hunched
over their laptops looking at the initial text and supplemental texts that classmates were working
into their annotations. Their bodies were more alert and less passive than they had been with just
the textbook selections.
In addition to that, a group of seven boys I observed were consistently moving their
fingers on the laptop’s trackpad — either by scrolling up and down periodically or by constantly

24
moving the cursor around the screen. This type of movement also occurred when students were
using their phones for some supplemental research or to change music.
Students also tended to visibly skim the text more than they did with the textbook,
especially when viewing supplemental links included in the annotations. The included images
and links caught student’s attentions more often than just the straight text annotations that some
students included.
Collaboration. Students also latched on to the idea of working with all of their
classmates, including those not in their specific class section, to elucidate a challenging text.
“Devan” mentioned the fact that, while the textbook version may have some footnotes and
explainers off to the side, the online version made it much faster and easier to understand, noting
that, in most cases, “People already had stuff explained and I could just click on it… it made side
notes easier.” In the follow up surveys, a few students echoed that same idea, stating that
viewing the annotations of others, “made [the text] a lot more friendly and easier to do [sic]
because we were able to draw on everyone's ideas about the text through the annotations.” In
fact, the majority of students surveyed cited this as the primary takeaway from the entire project:
“the annotations helped to explain challenging passages and provide more insight… It allowed
me to examine the text from a different perspective.”
As I conducted my observations, too, I noticed that the majority of students were
immediately gravitating toward annotations their classmates had worked in before attempting to
create their own, and as we worked throughout that first day this was becoming more and more
frequent — students in later classes were spending more time reviewing annotations from earlier
in the day before writing their own. “It was interesting,” one student remarked, “to be able to
read and interpret the text by yourself and then be able to go back and analyze other's

25
interpretations of certain things in the text.” This type of collaboration appeared to occur with
greater frequency in this digital format. During observations, in fact, when one student
completed an annotation, the student sitting next to him noticed it pop up on his screen and
immediately jumped in to add more information.
Students also made use of the feedback features in Genius (2015) to further clarify the
text as they were working. Genius requires that all suggestions be marked in the following
categories: “Restates the Line,” “It’s a Stretch,” “Missing Something,” and “Other.” Students
who made use of this feature were able to pinpoint why a particular annotation might not work
and offer suggestions as to how a particular annotation might be improved, as shown in Figure 3.
I observed that more students were taking advantage of this “silent feedback” feature than were
asking for help in small groups while using textbooks. Working across class periods also allowed
for a greater response group for student feedback than working with one or two people sitting
around a student.

26
Figure 3. Students making use of the suggestion features on Genius (2015).
Novelty wears off. As the project went on, though, the novelty of the assignment began
to wear off as more and more students were finishing. Student engagement with the text tended
to fall off once students had completed the parameters of the assignment, and while some
discussion and review of the text did occur, for the most part it became just one more assignment
in the grade books.
As Julia put it in our interview, while the project itself allowed for greater access to
supplemental and clarifying materials, “actually reading [the text was] about the same. It’s not
like I was like, ‘oh, this is way more fun now that it’s online!’” Even as students were able to
identify and discuss the things they liked about working collaboratively on Genius, one student
summed it up best when he stated, “for all that it can do, Genius could not change my opinion on
certain stories, or change their difficulty.” That said, all but one of the study participants

27
responded in the follow-up survey that using Genius helped change their attitudes toward reading
a required text.
Level of Effort
Time spent working. As mentioned previously, students across all classes immediately
bought in to working on the Genius platform, though that immediate excitement began to wane
as the day wore on. Students in the first period of the day worked hard all the way through the
class period, while students in later periods began to lose interest earlier and earlier, with a few
students in the last period of the day packing up ten minutes before class ended. Males, in
particular, tended to stop working as soon as the minimum requirements of the project were met,
while female students tended to go in and leave comments long after they had met these
requirements.
Revision and hunting for images. During sectional observations, I noticed that a greater
number of students were taking the time to go in and revise their annotations for clarity before
posting them to the Genius site. There also wasn’t as much noticeable complaining about the
need to go and hunt down outside resources to work in to annotations, as students tended to view
this as part of the process of working in a multimodal text. One girl noted that, “having pictures
along with the annotation made it even easier because sometimes it's hard to picture things that
you aren't familiar with.” Because of that attitude toward images, students tended to spend more
time finding the perfect image to include with their annotations. This, in many of my
observations, took more time than the actual writing of the annotation.
Personalization. This hunt for the perfect image was also part of a larger theme of
personalization that began to emerge through my observations. Many students took advantage of
tweaking their Genius profile to fit their interests by adding a profile picture, expressing their

28
interests and favorite quotes in the “About Me” section. The responses on Genius, as well,
became an outlet of creative expression for many students. More than a few times, in fact, an
expertly chosen image became the topic of conversation during student work time, and by and
large annotations that incorporated some degree of humor, whether it was student written or a
humorous image that captured the spirit of the text, tended to spur forth discussions during in-
class work time. These images, for one female student, made the text, “so much more fun with
all of the memes and good descriptions of the littlest details.” One boy even spent a good portion
of his work time one day creating an image with computer software to illustrate a point he
noticed in the section he started to annotate.
Reviewing for comp check. In addition to spending a great deal of time hunting for
images, students were more apt to review the text as we got closer to the completion of the
project. The Genius project, because of the way the schedule worked out, fell within a period of
time where we had one day off in the middle of the school week and a half day, both of which
cause all sorts of focus issues for high school juniors and seniors. Despite this, though, when
students were informed that they could use the Genius annotations to help them complete the
second comprehension check (See Appendix D), all students in my observations went right back
in to the text to review and read one another’s annotations. Even though technically students
were not given any more material to work with for this second comprehension check, it took a
great deal longer for students to complete because they were actively skimming and reviewing
the H.D. Thoreau (2000) text and annotations as they worked.
Completing required texts. Though students were more apt to go back in and review the
H.D. Thoreau (2000) text, they didn’t necessarily read it all the way through in the first place.
Three of the four students interviewed stated that they didn’t read this piece completely, instead

29
only focusing on enough to get a broad understanding of the piece and complete the assignments.
Julia mentioned that she, “would read parts that I was looking for [to complete the assignment],
but I don’t think I actually fully read it all — I know I didn’t,” adding that the length of the piece
was a major barrier. Erika cited a lack of interest in the material and the overall length of the
piece as major barriers, respectively. “It just wasn’t something that I like to read,” said Erika,
adding, “I get really bored and I kind of zone out and then I just think of other things…” Brent,
the one student who did read the entire Thoreau (2000) piece, said he was able to complete it
because the included audio “read to me.” The R.W. Emerson (2008) pieces had a similar
completion rate, with most students completing them because they were given time in class,
while a few did not finish reading one of the pieces due to lack of interest.
Student Comprehension
Table 1
Mean Comprehension Check Scores
Comp. Check Males Females Combined
Pre-Multimodal 4.33 2.93 3.73
Post-Multimodal 3.13 3.43 3.85
Diff. -1.2 +0.5 +0.12
Comprehension checks. Student scores on the two comprehension checks (See
Appendices C & D), in general, improved from the first to second comprehension check (See
Table 1). Total sample scores grew from an average of 3.73 to an average score of 3.85. The
male participants, though, actually regressed, moving from an average score of 4.33 to 3.13.
Female participants moved from an average score of 2.93 to 3.43.

30
Student blogs. Student blogs were evaluated using the blogging rubric (See Appendix
B). The average score on these blogs improved from pre- to post-multimodal literacy activities,
with a few exceptions. One student included in the study did not submit a pre-multimodal project
blog, and a different student did not submit a post-multimodal project blog. That said, the mean
scores for both male and female students improved from pre- to post-multimodal literacy project
(See Table 2). In a few cases (two males and two females), students actually included links back
to quotes and annotations made on Genius (2015), further integrating multimodal literacies into
their own extended written responses.
Table 2
Mean Blog Post Scores (Rubric in Appendix B)
Blog Post Males Females Combined
Pre-Multimodal 2.50 3.00 2.77
Post-Multimodal 3.00 3.57 3.31
Diff. +0.50 +0.57 +0.54
Genius annotations. Student Genius annotations were assessed based on the the amount
of insight given into the section a student chose to annotate, the inclusion of images, and links to
outside resources that readers could visit to gain more information about a particular section of
the text. Students were asked to not only explain a section of the text, but to make a guess as to
why Thoreau (2000) would have chosen to use those words or phrases to communicate with his
reader. There was no formal rubric for this assignment; instead, students were asked to reference
the Genius (2014) website’s guidelines for creating a good annotation: decode, or examine what
the line may be referring to or what function the line has in the text; research, which involves
adding interesting, relevant material to the annotation with links to where that information came

31
from, and visuals, or any image, video, or animated graphic interchange format (GIF) that fits the
annotation. The Genius community also values intelligence and humor, which students were
encouraged to incorporate. I also created a few examples of what a good annotation on Genius
might look like (See Figure 4).
Figure 4. Author created example of an acceptable Genius (2015) annotation.
Student annotations fell all over the spectrum between acceptable and needing work. All
students chosen for inclusion in this study were able to work in images and relevant links to their
annotations, but a few students really struggled to expand on the decoding part of the annotation.
For example, as seen in Figure 5, the student was able to define a peculiar word Thoreau (2000)
included in his text, though the student did not expand on why the author may have chosen that
word or what function the word had on the text at large.

32
Figure 5. Student annotation that meets some of the requirements, but fails to expand upon them
When students did meet the basic requirements, though, their annotations really did make
the text clearer for the rest of the students. In Figure 6, the student was able to chose a quote
from the source material, expand upon what the quote meant and why it may have been included
in the text at large, and made a relevant connection to an outside text through the inclusion of an
image.

33
Figure 6. Student annotation that meets the suggestions for a good annotation.
I observed that students began to collaborate across class sections to improve one
another’s annotations. In fact, some students chose to work exclusively by making suggestions
on the annotations of their classmates, and in many cases this ended up improving the overall
quality of the annotations. For example, when one student chose an image and wrote “Even in
the darkest tines [sic] you have some like in your life”, another student stepped in to expand
upon that thought, adding, “Sometimes when things get dark and really bad you realize that it
wasn’t really that bad and that you can get through anything because even in the dark there is
light. Sometimes you just have to be optimistic. A lot of times you learn from the bad things that
happen. Even in the darkest tines [sic] you have some like in your life.” In cases where a student
chooses to expand upon another student’s annotation, an editor (usually the instructor), must go
through all suggestions and decide whether to incorporate the suggestions or reject them and

34
offer a justification why. One student who did the majority of his work on the project by offering
suggestions on the annotations of others greatly improved the overall quality of these initial
annotations simply by incorporating links to outside resources and explaining sections of the text
rather than simply working in more images or personal thoughts. Figure 7 shows some examples
of the additions submitted to other students.
Figure 7. One student did more than the required amount of annotations by offering suggestions
to others.
Transcendentalism final projects. The final task we did with these Transcendentalist
texts involved students connecting the major themes of these texts to their own lives in any way
they wanted. Some students filmed videos, drew pictures, created collages, and, in a few
instances, created videos using digital games like Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) to explain how their
lives connect to the ideals of the Transcendentalists. Student projects were assessed based on
connections to the texts and the overall quality of the projects submitted (See Appendix F).

35
Many of the study participants chose to fulfill the requirements of this project through
writing: six students wrote one or more poems, one student wrote an essay connecting his
interests with the major themes of the texts, and one student wrote a song analysis explaining
how his feelings tied into both the song he chose to analyze and the texts that we read to prepare
for the project. Four students chose to work in some visual elements to their projects: three
constructed a photo collage and wrote a small piece of text that explained how the various
images tied in with the Transcendentalist themes, and one girl filmed a ten-minute documentary
in which she interviewed her nieces and nephews and, after a brief explanation of the core tenets
of Transcendentalism, asked them whether or not she could qualify as a transcendentalist. This
student then bookended the interviews with her own perceptions of whether or not she could be a
transcendentalist. One female student did not submit a final project.
Figure 8. Average Transcendentalism final project rubric scores by gender (See Appendix F).
Excluding the female student who did not submit a final project, all female students hit
fives for both the Connection and Quality elements of the rubric, though including zeroes for the
student who did not submit the project brought the mean score for both categories down to 4.29.
4
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
Connection to Text Quality of Work
Females Males

36
Male scores tended to differ quite a bit, and as such the Connection and Quality categories were
4.33 and 4.50, respectively (See Figure 8). Based on the individual student scores, male students
had a more difficult time connecting to the text and tended to rush their projects a little more than
female students (See Table 3).
Although there weren’t huge differences between the genders, female students tended to
gravitate toward visual project types instead of written project types (three females and one
male). Regardless of the type of project a student chose to complete, though, there was some
degree of writing involved.
Table 3
Students Final Project Rubric Scores & Types (See Appendix F)
Note. *Student did not submit a final project.
Troubleshooting
Early on in the Genius (2015) project some of the multimodal elements we were
attempting to use hit some technical glitches. One student had a laptop whose browser was out of
Student Connection Quality Project Type
M1 5 5 Written
M2 5 5 Written
M3 5 4 Written
M4 4 4 Written
M5 3 4 Written
M6 4 5 Visual
F1* 0 0 n/a
F2 5 5 Visual
F3 5 5 Visual
F4 5 5 Written
F5 5 5 Visual
F6 5 5 Written
F7 5 5 Written

37
date and could not run the embedded audio of the text. Another student, despite logging in
successfully the previous day, could not get into his Genius account and spent most of his in-
class work time attempting to reset his password. Yet another student could not get images to
post on his account until he tried a different laptop. In all cases, once the issue was resolved, the
students got straight to work.
Various other technical glitches happened throughout the duration of the project, but in
the majority of cases students were able and willing to help each other troubleshoot before they
asked for my assistance.
Conclusion
Student engagement, level of effort, and text comprehension were all affected throughout
the coding and review of data included in this chapter. In all three cases, student collaboration
and creativity played major roles. The potential reasons for this, as well as implications for past
and future research, will be discussed in chapter five.

Chapter 5
Discussion
mandated texts?
Student Engagement
One of the most immediate things I noticed when comparing the initial textbook-based
activity and the multimodal literacy activity was just how quickly students bought in to the
reading and assignments when asked to utilize the types of multimodal literacies Gee (2003)
mentioned in his work. It seemed as though students were, at least initially, more willing to put
in the work when these multimodal literacies were present (or, at the very least, students were
more willing to see what the work might entail). Even when the assignment required that
students read and decode a difficult text and do a little writing to summarize, students began to
work on their blog posts almost immediately, while the paper and pencil comprehension check
was drawn out by questions, complaints, and avoidance behaviors like sharpening pencils and
melting into a puddle over the thought of walking across the room to grab a textbook. In the
words of Lenhart (2015, p.2), adolescents are now immersed in these multimodal literacies
“constantly”, and the authentic writing task offered by composing a blog post that classmates

39
may read instead of just reciting facts for a teacher piqued the interests of my students. This
initial buy in was exciting to see.
Unfortunately, all good things cannot last. While this initial excitement carried over into
our work with the Genius (2015) platform and subsequent blog posts, students still began
packing up early and engaging in some typical avoidance behaviors. To paraphrase Julia, the use
of these multimodal literacies did not reveal itself as the student engagement silver bullet. As
time wore on, it was just another assignment that needed to be completed. While students did
mention that they enjoyed the project and would like to use similar multimodal activities on
future assignments, this particular project ended up being another task that asked them to engage
with a text that they may not have chosen on their own. For some these multimodal literacy
activities made the text more accessible and, in some cases, even helped students engage with the
material at a deeper level, but deep down many seemed to feel that it was just something a
teacher instructed them to do.
It was interesting, though, to notice how quick students were to begin collaborating with
classmates across sections and work together to improve the overall quality of the assignment.
When students were instructed to work together on the initial textbook reading assignment, there
was some hesitation to discuss what they were noticing; in an asynchronous online environment,
though, students were more apt to send suggestions and feedback to one another and use some of
the gamification elements, such as giving a thumbs up or down to indicate quality of work and
send feedback to one another. This was not something that I had initially intended to look for in
the study, but it does fit that, as students are further drawn to social networks and interacting and
communicating increasingly in digital spaces, they will begin to use these avenues for
educational purposes when they are available. This type of digital collaborative learning also

40
allows for students who are not comfortable sharing things in small group scenarios (or partnered
scenarios, for that matter) to inject their thoughts into the conversation with little fear of
rejection.
This excitement toward the collaborative elements that some multimodal activities allow
follows Sanford and Madill’s (2007) assertion that, while students (and young men in particular)
are gravitating toward digital spaces, they are not abandoning the literacy qualities valued in
school; they are simply finding new ways to access these same types of literacies. Through the
use of Genius (2015) to provide feedback and improve the quality of each other’s work, students
were tapping in to these multimodal literacies in an attempt to complete the assignment and bring
a required text into a sociocultural world that they understood. Again, while this study did not
offer the single answer for increasing engagement, students did respond positively to the
inclusion of literacies not typically utilized in “traditional” educational settings when it was
paired with peer interactions. After all, all students chose to use the digital version of this text
and their classmates’ annotations over the textbook when reviewing for comprehension checks.
Level of Effort
In addition to that initial interest in the assignment, students were more apt to revise and
hunt for outside resources, such as images and links to relevant websites. This may be because
including resources in a digital platform like the one used in this study is much easier than
creating a formal citation. In this instance, citing work was as simple as copying and pasting a
link into the text edit box. The Common Core Standards (National Governors Association Center
for Best Practices [NGA Center] & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010) ask
students to simply cite textual evidence without giving any guidelines for format. High school
students are often expected to use more formal methods of citations when writing formal essays,

41
but for digital forms of writing such as blogging, formal citations are often distracting rather than
assistive. In many forms of writing that incorporate multimodal literacies, the author of a piece is
expected to include URL links to relevant materials within the writing, since most multimodal
texts are intended to be read on a screen. Students, I think, are already accustomed to this style of
citation – sharing links on social media and through text messages is second nature to many of
them. In the case of this project, adding “citations” to other materials not only tapped into an
activity that many practice on their own, but it also helped the writing of the multimodal texts
seem more authentic. Similarly, student revisions were more prevalent because the multimodal
activities required students to write for authentic audiences – classmates and the world at large.
Students were more apt to do these activities because it lent their contributions an authenticity
they are used to seeing in their day-to-day lives, whereas formal citations, while necessary, are
still foreign to many budding scholars and therefore less important in the eyes of a student.
The ability for each student to make certain aspects of the assignment fit their
personalities was also a huge factor in the level of effort they displayed. Many students spent a
great deal of time hunting for the perfect image, creating relevant images using online software,
or completing their online profiles. Indeed, the mood of the students seemed to be much lighter
while working on different aspects of the multimodal project than they were during the initial
textbook based reading activity. Completing a profile and creating images using different
software programs was not a required element of this project, and it could even be argued that
these activities are a type of avoidance behavior because they were not required within the
assignment’s instructions, though I think these types of meanderings were still (sort of) on topic.
One student, who mentioned the lack of choice in the types of texts we read in school as a major
barrier, also mentioned that she enjoyed, “…[the] different areas to explore on Genius,” adding,

42
“[it was] nice, since everyone has their own preferences.” Even though students were technically
exploring outside the bounds of the assignment, they were still engaging in many of the
multimodal activities Gee (2003) referred to, exploring texts that were relevant to their social and
cultural backgrounds before returning the assignment at hand. Students who engaged in these
types of avoidance behaviors were also quicker to get back into the assignment than students
who were demonstrating avoidance behaviors in the traditional textbook-based assignments (i.e.
pausing their reading to respond to a text message).
Student Comprehension
The comprehension checks showed a slight increase in scores for female students and a
slight decrease in scores for male students. Lenhart (2015) found that all teenagers are online
“constantly,” and based on the number of cellphone infractions that take place in the hallway
outside my classroom, I am not surprised. Males, she found, were more likely to spend their time
playing video games while females tended to engage in image-based online environments. While
the gamification elements discussed above may have caught the interest of some students, it is
hard to say how long those elements held the attentions of my male students. The use of
gamification elements, like growing an IQ score on the Genius (2015) website, was not an
explicit part of the assignment, whereas the inclusion of images was explicitly stated in the
assignment’s directions. This might partially explain why female scores grew while male scores
regressed: the gamification elements weren’t stressed enough in my instruction.
Student blog scores did improve through the use of these multimodal literacies. This may
be tied to the amount of revision and review that students conducted throughout the Genius
(2015) project. Even though it was suggested, though not required, that these students go back
and review their annotations and the annotations of their peers, many students chose to look at

43
what their classmates had written. The second blog post also came a few days after the second
comprehension check, where students were given some more time to refine their annotations and
contributions to the Genius site. This extra time and exposure to the work of their classmates
may have helped their scores. As educators begin to stress collaborative learning activities to
achieve college and career readiness, it may be worth exploring more of these asynchronous,
multimodal literacy platforms as a means of 21st
century learning. After all, these students chose
to rely on the work of their peers over the work of a random, though surely more famous,
summary website found through an internet search. Collaborative learning in the classroom can
be ephemeral – once the class period has ended, the learning may not stick. In an asynchronous
environment, these learning experiences can be revisited.
Annotations tended to be all over the place. As mentioned in chapter four, while all
students were able to work in photos without any problems, some students struggled with
translating and expanding on the initial text. This could be because the R.W. Emerson (2008) and
H.D. Thoreau (2000) texts are more difficult than the texts many students are used to
encountering, especially in online environments, which could account for this lack of expansion
in some student annotations. Even with this, many students mentioned that the Genius (2015)
project made the texts clearer for them.
The final project scores also showed some interesting results. Excluding the female
student who neglected to turn in a final project, all female students hit a 5 for both the connection
of the project to the initial text and the overall quality, and all female students chose to work in
some sort of visual element, which reflects the findings of Lenhart (2015) that females tended to
gravitate toward visual-based internet sites. Males, though, had a more difficult time connecting
to the text, scoring an average of 4.33. One of the reasons for this might stem from the fact that

44
the texts of H.D. Thoreau (2000) and R.W. Emerson (2008) do not reflect the male genderlect
that Parkhust (2012) and Williams (2004) noted were absent from most classroom settings. The
subject matter of these texts, which involve thinking for oneself and living and interacting with
nature, tended to be interesting to those students who could decode the difficult and poetic style
of writing. Learning about freedom and independence proved to be a sticking point for some
male students, even though these themes are very much relevant to the variety of changes
adolescents must face. The language contained within these pieces was not immediately
recognizable to these male students, the Transcendentalists tend to fall on the “intellectually” and
“morally superior” side of the types of text often found in schools, texts that male students
traditionally have a difficult time working with (Williams, 2004, p. 512). While the multimodal
literacies initially helped students buy in to the assignment, they could not change the fact that
the subject matter of the required pieces does not reflect the types of texts that adolescent males
tend to be drawn toward, such as those that Parkhurst (2012) mentioned, which contain elements
of science fiction and fantasy or scenes of action. An educator could pair the Transcendentalist
texts with student selected texts that exhibit similar themes as a way to utilize these multimodal
literacies.
Limitations
The most obvious limitation to this study is the number of participants, thirteen out of the
initially proposed twenty. In addition, one of the female participants did not submit two of the
pieces of data examined in the study. The gender breakdown was also not an even ten males and
ten females as initially proposed. However, I believe a qualitative study such as this can offer
valuable insight into how the rise of multimodal texts are affecting the reading behaviors of our

45
students and, potentially, what we can do to utilize these literacies to become more effective
educators.
Implications
While the use of multimodal literacies did not translate to greater academic success for all
students, some of these findings encourage educators to include such activities in their
curriculum. For example, many students indicated that the included audio of the texts was a
major factor in their completion of the assignment, especially when the text was not as
interesting or engaging as they had hoped. Even though most educators make efforts to include
these supplements when necessary, the immediate accessibility of these resources was a major
help to students who otherwise might not bother to take advantage of them.
Additionally, the multimodal literacies increased student buy-in to the assignment, but
this buy-in tended to die off as students sank down into the actual work of reading a difficult text
that may or may not hold any immediate relevance for them. If this spike in initial student
engagement were used in conjunction with texts that reflected student interests like those
mentioned by Parkhurst (2012), Williams (2004), and Smith and Wilhelm (2002), there could be
positive implications for student reading engagement, effort, and comprehension, especially for
male students.
Recommendations for Further Research
One of the more interesting observations I made during this study was how some students
tended to keep their fingers moving on the trackpad while they were reading. It would be
interesting to do further research on this phenomenon to see if such a small movement might be
considered an outlet for more kinesthetic learners. Could such fidgeting help students focus
during digital reading assignments?

46
I would also be interested to see how some slight alterations in the study might affect
student comprehension scores. There has been much talk about how reading comprehension
scores tend to be lower in web-reading than they do in paper-based reading. Future research
could divide students into two groups, one all digital and one all print, to see if the use of
multimodal literacies and screen-based reading has a similar negative effect on reading
comprehension. Similarly, one could replicate this study and hold off on the comprehension
checks for an extended period of time to examine how information is retained when using
multimodal literacies.
Conclusions
Though the initial student excitement over the Genius (2015) project was exciting to
witness, that exciting beginning turned into that pit-in-the-stomach that all teachers have
experienced at one time or another: widespread student disinterest. Again, even though this type
of project didn’t end up being the be-all, end-all of reading cures, there were some small
glimmers of hope throughout the study that could lead to more effective curriculum and
instruction design as educators attempt to mirror the changing definitions of “literacy” in their
classrooms.
In the end, though initial student engagement spiked before tapering off as the project
wore on, students tended to work quite a bit harder, and tended to enjoy their work, when they
incorporated these multimodal literacies, and reading comprehension grew slightly with the use
of some activities such as blogging and collaborating with peers in asynchronous environments,
it would seem that the lack of student choice in the pieces we read ultimately played a greater
role than any other aspect of the study. Teenagers, like all of us, are more likely to be engaged
with their learning when they have a personal connection to the material being covered. All of

47
the tweets and GIFs that multimodal learning environments have to offer us cannot make up for
the fact that the texts in question were not self-selected, and, at least in this case, these digital
tools could not help students overcome such a significant hurdle. R.W. Emerson (2008), writing
in his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” says that the path of nonconformity is more difficult than
others because, “… you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better
than you know it” (p. 364). Maybe our job as educators is to not only introduce our students to
the classic texts that comprise many curriculum mandates, but also to broaden our approach to
such texts and make use of the myriad of tools at our disposal to ensure that the path of
individuality is more accessible to those we teach.

48
References
Allen, J., Applebee, A. N., Burke, J., Carnine, D., Jackson, Y., Jiménez, R.T., . . . Tomlinson, C.
A. (Eds.). (2008a). McDougal Littell literature: American literature. Evanston, Illinois:
McDougal Littell.
Allen, J., Applebee, A. N., Burke, J., Carnine, D., Jackson, Y., Jiménez, R.T., . . . Tomlinson, C.
A. (Eds.). (2008b). Literature resource manager: Unit two. Evanston, Illinois: McDougal
Littell.
Bethesda Game Studios. (2011). The elder scrolls V: skyrim. [Xbox 360 game]. Rockville, MD:
Bethesda Softworks.
Emerson, R. W. (2008). Self-Reliance and nature. In J. Allen, A. N. Applebee, J. Burke, D.
Carnine, Y. Jackson, R.T. Jiménez… & C. A. Tomlinson (Eds.), McDougal Littell American
Literature (pp. 360-366). Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell.
Freire, P. (1983). The importance of the act of reading. Journal of Education, 165(1), 5-11.
Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Genius. (2014). Become a genius. Retrieved from http://genius.com/Genius-become-a-genius-
annotated
Genius. (2015, February 13). Retrieved from http://genius.com
Genius Founders. (2014, July 12). Introducing genius.com. Retrieved from
http://genius.com/Genius-founders-introducing-geniuscom-annotated
Kush, J.C., & Watkins, M.W. (1996). Long-term stability of children’s attitudes toward reading.
The Journal of Educational Research, 89(5), 315-319.

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Lenhart, Amanda, Pew Research Center, April 2015, “Teen, Social Media and Technology
Overview 2015.”
McGonigal, J. (2010). Gaming can make a better world. Retrieved from
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world
McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change
the world. New York: Penguin Publishing.
Mojang. (2011). Minecraft. [PC game]. Stockholm, Sweden: Microsoft Studios.
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School
Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy in
history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Washington, DC: Authors.
Parkhurst, H.B. (2012). The case of the missing male reader: implications of genderlect and the
reality principle. American Secondary Education, 41(1), 14-30.
Sanford, K. and Madill, L. (2007). Understanding the power of new literacies through video
game play and design. Canadian Journal of Education, 30(2), 432-455.
Scholastic. (2015). Kids and family reading report (5th ed.). New York: Author.
Senn, N. (2012). Effective approaches to motivate and engage reluctant boys in literacy. The
Reading Teacher, 66 (3), 211-220.
Smith, M.W., & Wilhelm, J.D. (2002). “Reading don’t fix no Chevys”: Literacy in the lives of
young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Square Enix. (1997). Final fantasy VII. [Sony Playstation game].
Thoreau, H.D. (2000). Walden and other writings. New York: The Modern Library.
U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education
Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2013, Reading Assessment.

50
Williams, B.T. (2004). Boys may be boys, but do they have to read and write that way? Journal
of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 47 (6), 510-515.

52
Appendix A
Preliminary Student Survey

55
Appendix B
Blogging Rubric
1 2 3 4
Tells a few events
from text not
necessarily in order.
Misinterprets message
or theme of text.
Summarizes a few
events in the reading
selections with some
details and vocabulary
from text. Little or no
interpretation of
message or theme.
Summarizes many
events in the reading
selection in correct
order including many
from text. Interprets
message or theme
literally.
Summarizes events in
the reading selection in
correct sequence using
from text. Interprets
message or theme with
higher-level thinking.

56
Appendix C
Pre-Multimodal Literacy Task Comprehension Questions
Name: _______________________ Hr. _____
Comprehension Check #1 – Emerson
Adapted from Allen et al. (2008b).
1. In “Self-Reliance,” at what conviction does Emerson say that all people arrive during their
education?
2. According to Emerson’s Nature, to what do people return when they enter nature?
3. In Nature, what does Emerson say is the greatest delight that nature ministers?
4. In “Self-Reliance,” what two fears does Emerson identify as those that stop people from
trusting themselves?
5. In Nature, in what way does Emerson say that nature can change on the basis of people’s
moods?
6. On a scale from one to five, how difficult was this piece for you to read?
Very Difficult 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all difficult

57
Appendix D
Post-Multimodal Literacy Task Comprehension Questions
Name: _______________________ Hr. _____
Comprehension Check #2 – Thoreau
Adapted from Allen et al. (2008b).
1. How does Thoreau first describe his house in Walden?
2. What reasons does Thoreau give for moving to the woods?
3. In Walden, what are Thoreau’s ideas about loneliness?
4. What reason does Thoreau give for wanting to leave the woods?
5. Why does Thoreau dislike the post-office and newspapers?
6. On a scale from one to five, how difficult was this piece for you to read?
Very Difficult 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all difficult

58
Appendix E
Follow-Up Survey

60
Appendix F
Summative Assessment
Name: _________________________ Hr. _____
Thoreau and Emerson Wrap Up
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” - Emerson
Expressing oneself and being an individual is one of the driving forces behind the
Transcendentalist philosophy. As long as we are true to our own judgements about right and
wrong, we don’t need to worry about being misunderstood. Your task is to create a piece of art
expressing who you are as an individual. Write an essay, poem or song. Paint or draw a picture.
Take a series of photographs. Make a video. Your choices are limitless, but you must clear your
selection with me first. If you choose one of the visual art options you must write two paragraphs
explaining how the selection fits the theme of “self-reliance.”
Connection to the Text
Your project showed that you had a clear
understanding of the text and made connections to 5 4 3 2 1
the major themes of Transcendentalism and the pieces
influenced by Transcendentalism.
Quality
The finished product made it clear that you spent
a great deal of time working on and completing your project.
(AKA you didn’t start the night before it was due, and you 5 4 3 2 1
fixed what was wrong on the rough draft.)

61
Appendix G
Interview Questions
● Tell me about your experience with reading when you were younger.
● Tell me about your experience reading now.
● Tell me about your experience reading the Transcendentalist texts while we used the
Genius platform. In what ways did this digital aspect affect your engagement with the
text?
● In what ways do you approach reading texts differently depending on where they are
published (e.g. digitally vs. traditional print) ?
● Of the three Transcendentalist pieces we looked at in class, how many of them did you
actually read?

62
Appendix H
Participant Consent Letter
To:
You are invited to be in a study at Minot State University. We are trying to see how the use of
multimodal literacies influence student reading comprehension, reading frequency, and
enjoyment of required texts.
You will read several required texts and respond and analyze them using a website called
Genius. In addition, you will write blog posts and take a few surveys throughout the study. You
may also be asked to participate in a tape-recorded interview.
Your individual results will not be shown to anybody else. We will not use your name. The final
results will be put together in a report with all the other results.
This study will be conducted as part of a regular classroom assignment. Opting not to participate
means that your information will not be used in the study; however, you will still be required to
complete the assignment as part of our course.
Signing this letter means you want to participate. If you change your mind you are free to stop at
any time. Just let me know!
If you have any questions, please ask. Your parent/guardian may also call me. Thanks for your
help!
Jacob Thomas
____________________________________ (Your Signature)
____________________________________ (Your name printed)
____________________________________ (Your parent/guardian’s name)

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