The CASPA Model for student assignments, developed at William & Mary, takes a holistic approach to multimodal projects, focusing on integrating particular communication types into your course. 

By integrating and studying a particular communication type into your course, you will give students a better understanding of the affordances and constraints of that communication type within the discipline and more generally. 

CASPA, explained below, stands for Consume, Analyze, Scaffold, Produce, and Assess, the five basic stages of each student assignment.

Download a PDF Handout of the CASPA framework here

Watch a brief summary of the CASPA model above

The Analyze Stage of CASPA is all about developing criteria with which to judge the effectiveness of the storytelling. By breaking down the podcast or the website or the poster, etc. into its component parts, students can begin to see, not just the way a particular story is constructed, but what skills might be necessary to produce such a work. At this stage, it's helpful to consider some models of what good storytelling must have. There are many models to choose from, and you can find some of them here:

Elements of Good Storytelling

You can use one or a combination of several models to help create a rubric for what will constitute good storytelling in your own course assignments. Here are some examples of storytelling rubrics for a variety of multimodal assignments:

• Podcasting Rubric from the University of Wisconsin

• Video Project Rubric from the University of Wisconsin

• Website/Digital Portfolio Rubric from the University of Wisconsin

In many courses, the Produce stage is given significantly more weight than any of the other stages, but that can put undue emphasis on the physical product in the learning process. If the idea is to teach students about effective communication, we encourage that each stage in the CASPA model be graded at some level. This makes the stakes lower for the actual finished product and focuses attention on the entire process. It is also often helpful for some projects to contain an artist's statement or an author's statement that is turned in along with the product that can serve to explain the choices made in the assignment. One thing that we encourage is that you leave plenty of time after the assignment is handed in to include the final stage, the Assess stage, below.

Here's a cool example of how one artist goes about conceptualizing and writing an artist's statement.

In very basic terms, the Assess stage allows students to apply the rubric that they used to analyze the stories they consumed in Stages 1 and 2 to the work they produced in Stage 4 above. This can be as simple as having students go through their work and grade themselves (or their peers) using the same exact rubric they used in the Analyze stage. It can be more complex if you like. One good technique is to have students reflect on the affordances and limitations of the type of communication they used to tell their stories and how it might have come out differently if they had chosen a different mode of communication. Another good assessment technique, especially if you plan on doing peer assessment, is to ask students to reflect on the clearest points and the muddiest points, the part of the project that was strongest, the part that might have been omitted, or something that the project could have benefited from.